Daily News Digest March 4, 2019

Daily News Digest March 4, 2019

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: Austerity, Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and  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 1% 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:

They Will If You Will 

Tinkle Down

Quotes of the Day: 

 Larry Wilkerson: …I encountered a senator who–a long-serving senator of the Republican Party. . .And here’s the scenario. We go over to the White House with the leaders of Congress, both parties, just as they did, basically, with Richard Nixon after Watergate. And we say to the president “You have two choices, Mr. President. You can suffer these very powerful articles of impeachment. We guarantee you you’ll be removed from office, and after that we’ll prosecute you and your family to the full extent of the law, which is perfectly legal. Or here’s your alternative, Mr. President. You can resign, as Richard Nixon did, and we won’t prosecute you or your family. You have a choice.” I said, OK. That doesn’t sound like all that implausible a scenario to me. And the senator said, yeah, but here’s my question to you. Trump won’t leave, and he calls to the streets his legions. And as you know, his legions are the most well-armed legions in America. In fact, his base owns probably 75 to 90 percent of the guns in America. And the FBI will tell you that. What’s the military going to do? the senator asked me. My response I won’t share with you, but it was a very, very serious response. And it vouchsafe to talk about the military, the constitutional crisis, and other things. — Trump and Netanyahu Scandals a Very Dangerous Moment – Wilkerson & Jay

Trumpism is just the open expression of  the belief that capitalism has the right and duty to expand, to dominate, and control the wold. — A Manifest Destiny, a phrase coined in 1845, expressed the philosophy that drove 19th-century U.S. territorial expansion. Manifest Destiny held that the United States was destined—by God, its advocates believed—to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent.

Big Energy/U.S. Capitalism Has Made a Conscious Decision   to  Commit Humancide Rather Than Lose Their Profit Making Enterprises: ” The panelists examined the corporate genesis of the climate denial movement and the many methods of influence that have been utilized to stall effective climate change policy. Using documents and analysis found on Climate Files, Davies recounted how the largest oil majors, including Shell and Exxon, had extensive internal knowledge about climate change science and impacts decades before it became a topic of global concern. Rather than addressing the threat that their product posed to the world, the documents show that the fossil fuel industry engaged and funded a climate change countermovement to deny the urgency their own scientists knew to be true. — The Climate Change Countermovement: Brown University Report and Panel

Malcolm X Quote

Videos of the Day:

Trump and Netanyahu Scandals a Very Dangerous Moment – Wilkerson & Jay Desperate men do desperate things; two leaders facing corruption charges may more aggressively push their Iran regime change agenda – Larry Wilkerson joins Paul Jay

Specter of Fascism: Cohen Says Trump Won’t Leave Peacefully in 2020

Venezuela and American Manifest Destiny – Gerald Horne   A core concept of “Americanism” is the belief that the United States has a God given right to control all of the Americas in the name of democracy and freedom–but in reality, for plunder and commercial interest – historian Gerald Horne joins Paul Jay

Big Tech Stole Our Data While Democracy Slept: Shoshana Zuboff on the Age of Surveillance Capitalism “We Thought We Were Searching Google, But Google Was Searching Us”

Teen Climate Activist to Sen. Dianne Feinstein: We Need the Green New Deal to Prevent the Apocalypse

U.S.:

15 Claims From Trump’s Speech to CPAC, Fact-Checked President Trump addressed the annual gathering of conservatives for over two hours on Saturday. Here’s a fact-check.  By Linda Qiu

Trump, The Crouch Grabbers’s, Choice: The Cowardly Labor Secretary A  judge says that as a prosecutor, Alexander Acosta broke the law to help a powerful man accused of abusing girls. While he was the United States attorney for the Southern District of Florida in 2007, Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta oversaw a plea deal for Jeffrey Epstein, the New York financier accused of sexually abusing more than 80 underage girls. Rich and well-connected — his friends and acquaintances included Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, Woody Allen and Donald Trump — Mr. Epstein faced a 53-page federal indictment that could have put him in prison for life, according to The Miami Herald, which ran a blockbuster expose in November. The F.B.I. was also investigating him on suspicion of masterminding an international sex-trafficking operation. By The Editorial BoardFemale Leaders Warn Against Global Rise of Autocratic ‘Strongmen’ and Attack on Women’s Rights “We seek to underscore that the risk posed by policies that seek to halt and erode gender equality is a risk not only to women, but also to all of humanity.” Troubled by the rise of a number of autocratic, nationalist male politicians who have convinced voters that they aim to return their nations to a glorified past, more than two dozen female world leaders signed an open letter Thursday, calling for a global fight against what one signer calls “macho-type strongmen” and their so-called “populist” movements. By Julia Conley

Activists, Banks and For-Profit Immigrant Detention JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo lend to GEO Group and CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), for-profit operators of immigrant detention facilities under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A campaign to end these banks’ financial role is underway. Autumn Gonzalez is with the Sacramento-based NorCal Resist, a migrant activist group advocating on behalf of the incarcerated immigrants held in GEO Group and CoreCivic facilities. “We are circulating petitions to send to the CEOs and boards of directors of GEO and CoreCivic to end their lending to private prison operators,” she said by phone. “I had a mortgage with Wells Fargo and have told them that I am not satisfied with it lending to both private prison companies.” By Seth Sandronsky

Facing 2020 and Bernie 2.0: What the Greens Must Do Four years ago this May I was the first to brand Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as 2016’s Democratic sheepdog candidate. As I explained then, “The sheepdog is a card the Democratic party plays every presidential primary season when there’s no White House Democrat running for re-election. The sheepdog is a presidential candidate running ostensibly to the left of the establishment Democrat to whom the billionaires will award the nomination. Sheepdogs are herders, and the sheepdog candidate is charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic party, either staying home or trying to build something outside the two party box.”  Four years later, that hasn’t changed. Bernie 2.0 is still the sheepdog, running to the left of the rest of the field of Democratic presidential contenders, beckoning, barking at us to come on back under the tent. What’s different now is that Bernie is the front runner, for whatever that’s worth 21 months out from election day and likely the most popular politician in the country. Bruce A. Dixon, BAR managing editor

The “Failed” Hanoi Summit? Not From Beijing’s Point of View North Korea’s most important relationship is with China. The most important relationship for China is with the United States. In January a train carrying North Korea’s leader  Kim Jong-un stopped in Beijing on a chilly morning. China’s president Xi Jinping held talks with Kim to prep him for the Trump summit.  The exact details of the talks are off course shrouded in secrecy but it is not hard to imagine their general thrust. Xi probably instructed Kim to play hardball. Great, if you get what you want, fine, but in all probability even Trump, the dealmaker-in-chief, will not grant you the complete lifting of sanctions, would be a fair summing up of Xi’s argument. Trump retreating from Hanoi with empty pockets will make him even more prone to striking a trade deal with China, Beijing believes, to show the art of the deal is still alive. In the meantime China and Russia will invest in North Korea and the US will still be engaged. Not a bad outcome. By Tom Clifford

Big Brother is Watching You: The Age of Tyrannical Surveillance To be technically accurate, Big Brother—aided and abetted by his corporate partners in crime—wants your data. That’s what we have been reduced to in the eyes of the government and Corporate America: data bits and economic units to be bought, bartered and sold to the highest bidder. Those highest bidders include America’s political class and the politicians aspiring to get elected or re-elected. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “If you have been to a political rally, a town hall, or just fit a demographic a campaign is after, chances are good your movements are being tracked with unnerving accuracy by data vendors on the payroll of campaigns.” By Stclair

Survival of the Richest: All Are Equal, Except Those Who Aren’t Like a gilded coating that makes the dullest things glitter, today’s thin veneer of political populism covers a grotesque underbelly of growing inequality that’s hiding in plain sight. And this phenomenon of ever more concentrated wealth and power has both Newtonian and Darwinian components to it. By Nomi Prins 

‘A Major Failure’: North Korea Summit Cut Short as Trump Refuses to Lift Sanctions “This is a huge missed opportunity and a disappointment to Koreans waiting 67 years to see a decisive end to the Korean War.” By Jessica Corbett

Environment:

IMT statement: capitalism is killing the planet – we need a revolution! “The ocean is rising, and we are too.” So read one placard at the recent #YouthStrike4Climate in London. Young people across the world are taking to the streets to address the burning issue of our epoch: the impending climate catastrophe. Starting in Sweden last August with the weekly protests of one school student, Greta Thunberg, the youth strikes have rapidly spread internationally. In every country the situation is the same: a new, radicalised generation is entering into political activity, demanding action and system change to avert environmental destruction.

Whither Humanity? The Environmental Crisis of Capitalism  In the present world, the rights of the capitalists to make a profit are in direct conflict with our basic rights. In this sense, the capitalist system has become a threat to humanity. Jefferson’s words, from the Declaration of Independence, that human rights are unalienable, mean that these rights can never be superseded. At all points of conflict the rights of humanity to survive must supersede the right of the few to make a profit. The right to a safe environment is an unalienable human right! Since environmental illness and destruction are a global concern, it requires all of humanity to act collectively, in our overall interests for our survival as a species, to correct the problem and to remove the obstacle of capitalism. It requires a society where humanity has social, economic, and political control over the entire environment. Such a society, a socialist society, is needed to ensure that all decisions affecting the environment are under the democratic control of humankind so that the production of goods will be done for the needs and survival of humanity instead of the production and the destruction of humanity and other species for profit. With common ownership of the means of production, and common control and protection of all property and wealth, science and society will be in harmony with the ecosystem and humanity’s future. With these goals we can begin to build a more effective environmental movement. As we continue to organize against capitalism and its destructive course, we can and will transform the world. By Roland Sheppard(1999)

Big Energy:

Civil Rights/Black Liberation:

The Double Life Of Civil Rights Photographer And Fbi Informant Ernest Withers The Great Civil Rights photographer Ernest Withers was sitting in a Sumner, Mississippi, courtroom in September 1955 when Emmett Till’s uncle, Moses Wright, took the stand to testify against the two white men who had come to his house one night and taken away his 14-year-old nephew. As Wright defied an entire history that had kept black Americans “in their place” by pointing his index finger and identifying one of his nephew’s murderers, Withers defied the judge’s orders and snapped one of the first iconic images of the civil rights era. By Alice Speri

Keith Tharpe and the Death Penalty’s Racist Roots Recently, the appalling spectacle of a black man condemned by a Georgia jury, a jury that included a racist bigot, reentered the American consciousness; if you haven’t heard about this travesty of justice (yet), or, if you’ve forgotten its details, all you need to know about the Keith Tharpe case is: a now-deceased juror who sentenced Tharpe to death swore in an affidavit Tharpe was a “ni**er,” and further, “after studying the Bible,” he “wondered if black people even have souls.” Spared execution over these facts by a last-minute stay in September 2017, Tharpe’s case is, once again, back before the United States Supreme Court; the Court can grant a writ of certiorari, to consider the merits of Tharpe’s claim of racial bias, or, not. By Stephen Cooper

Labor:

GM is Closing My Plant, What are Politicians Going to Do About It? For the past 20 years, I’ve walked at least nine miles a day on the body shop floor of the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, where I help assemble the Chevy Cruze. In a few weeks, when GM shutters our plant, I’ll walk my last mile. I don’t know what’s next for me and nearly 15,000 other workers who are being laid off at GM plants across the country. What I do know is that GM is forcing my fellow workers to choose between mandatory relocation to other plants, hundreds of miles away from their families, and the unemployment line. By Nanette Senters

Economy:

 Shadow Government StatisticsAlternate Unemployment Charts The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers. The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment. The ShadowStats Alternate Unemployment Rate for January 2019 is 21.8%.

World:

Cuba Adopts a New Socialist Constitution In February 24, 2019, the Cuban people overwhelmingly adopted a new constitution, as 84.4% of resident citizens voted in the constitutional referendum, with 86.8 % voting “Yes,” 9% “No,” 2.5% blank ballots, and 1.6% annulled. Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Cuba has been striving to develop a socialist constitutional foundation.  The evolving Cuban constitutionality includes: reformulations of liberal bourgeois concepts of political and civil rights, including the development of popular democracy; universal protection of social and economic rights; proclamation of the rights of nations to sovereignty and to control of their natural resources, in opposition to imperialism; and definition of the necessary role of the state in the protection of the rights of the people and the nation.  Cuban socialist constitutionality has been developed on a foundation of extensive popular participation.  And it has been developed with consciousness of its historic antecedents: The Constitution of Guáimaro of April 10, 1869, which created the Republic of Cuba in Arms; and the Constitution of 1940, an advanced and progressive constitution, not implemented by “democratic” governments and set aside by the Batista dictatorship. By Charles Mckelvey

Germany rebuffs British pressure to sell arms to Saudi Arabia ‘We are not supplying arms to Saudi Arabia currently,’ Germany’s foreign minister tells his British counterpart. The German government will not resume arms sales to Saudi Arabia despite British diplomatic pressure to do so, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told his British counterpart Wednesday. “The attitude of the federal government is that we are not supplying arms to Saudi Arabia currently. We will take future decisions dependent on developments in the Yemen conflict,” Maas said while hosting the U.K.’s Jeremy Hunt By Joshua Posaner

Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:

California is now one of the lowest State for Education Funding —Figures Don’t Lie, But Politicians Can ‘Figure’:

The California Lottery reported a boom year on Monday with sales of $6.3 billion, shattering last year’s record of $5.5 billion. California schools will receive $1.5 billion this year, up from $1.39 billion in the last fiscal year. To put that in perspective, the most recent state budget apportions $65.8 billion from the general fund for K-12 and higher education. —California Lottery posts highest sales on record

The California State Lottery Act of 1984 was intended to provide more money to schools without imposing extra taxes. Accordingly, the Lottery was required to provide at least 34% of its revenues to public education, supplementing (not replacing) other funds provided by California. Another 50% of its revenues must be paid to the public in the form of prizes, making a mandated minimum of 84% of all funds that must be given back to the public in the form of prizes or funds for public education. The remainder, a maximum of 16%, was to be spent on administration, such as salaries and running the games. On April 8, 2010, Governor Schwarzenegger signed into law Assembly Bill 142 (Hayashi, D-Hayward).[1] Amending the Lottery Act, this bill reallocates Lottery revenues “so as to maximize the amount of funding allocated to public education.” As an urgency statute, this bill took effect immediately. The new allocation increased to at least 87% the portion of Lottery revenue returned to the public, and correspondingly decreased to a maximum of 13% the amount spent on administration. It then specified that “not less than 50% of the total annual Lottery revenues, in an amount to be determined by the commission, be returned to the public in the form of prizes.” This leaves “the commission to establish the percentage to be allocated to the benefit of public education at a level that maximizes the total net revenues allocated to the benefit of public education.” It also imposed requirements “to ensure continued growth in Lottery net revenues allocated to public education”, with annual procedures that would, “in any one of the first 5 full fiscal years after the enactment of this measure, … provide for the repeal of the changes made by this measure on the following January 1, and the prior law to be restored”, if those requirements were not then met.[2][3] This bill follows the practice of “other large state lottery systems, including Texas, North Carolina, and Florida, which have shown an increase in revenue through similar changes.” — Wilkileaks

28 February 1947: Taiwan’s February Revolution The so-called “February 28th Incident” (228, 二二八事件) is most remembered for the days of indiscriminate killings and repression that the Chinese bourgeois dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his KMT forces unleashed on Taiwan in 1947. Thousands of civilians were murdered in cold blood. It marked the beginning of a long-standing sentiment for Taiwanese national self-determination that permeates a large part of Taiwanese masses to this day. By Parson Young

Eli Broad’s Takeover of Urban Public Education and Strikes “Broad has systematically launched a draconian assault  on K-12 public education teachers and the institution itself, while Democratic elected officials, especially the 2020 presidential candidates have largely remained silent.” Eli Broad, the California multi-billionaire advocate and promoter of the privatization of public education, has been systematically taking over urban public school districts from coast to coast. He has generally remained out of the news until recently when a few print media outlets have begun to report on his efforts. But they do not detail Broad’s connections to the recent teachers’ strikes that have crisscrossed the nation and that have become more pronounced in California where Broad houses his private education reform operations. By Dr. Walter C. Farrell, Jr., PhD, MSPH

Today’s 1%: America’s 60 Families is a book by American journalist Ferdinand Lundberg published in 1937 by Vanguard Press. It is an argumentative analysis of wealth and class in the United States, and how they are leveraged for purposes of political and economic power, specifically by what the author contends is a “plutocratic circle” composed of a tightly interlinked group of 60 families. The controversial study has met with mixed reactions since its publication. Though praised by some contemporary and modern reviewers, and once cited in a speech by Harold L. Ickes, it has also been criticized by others and was the subject of a 1938 libel suit by DuPont over factual inaccuracies contained in the text. In 1968 Lundberg published The Rich and the Super-Rich, described by some sources as a sequel to America’s 60 Families.. . .In America’s 60 Families Lundberg analyzes 1924 income tax payments[c] to estimate levels of consolidated familial wealth and to map networks of capital interconnectedness in the United States. Using his findings, Lundberg asserts that a small group of 60 interlinked American families control the mainstream media, the United States economy, and have unchecked influence over American political institutions. He goes on to claim this nucleus of 60 families is supported by a larger group of 440 families of secondary prestige. According to Lundberg, this situation is unique to the United States as the plutocracies of Europe had largely disintegrated due to World War I:[2][10]