Daily News Digest July 25, 2019

Daily News Digest July 25, 2019

Daily News Digest Achives

Since World War I, ‘the war to end all wars’, there have been perpetual wars for perpetual peace, this Laura Gray’s cartoon from the front page of The Militant August 18, 1945, under banner headline: “There Is No Peace” Could Still Be Published Today!

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.    Socialism Means True Democracy — The 99% Will Rule! — Not the Few!

Images of the Day: 

Racist BonesQuotes of the Day:

. . .It’s impossible for a chicken to produce a duck egg… The system of this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, this social system, this system period. It is impossible for it , as it now stands, to produce freedom right now for the Black man in this country — it is impossible. And if ever a chicken did produce a duck egg, I’m certain you would say it was certainly a revolutionary chicken. — Malcolm X, Harlem ’Hate Gang’ Scare Militant Labor Forum, May 29, 1964

My life has recently intersected, in a most personal way, two of Mark Twain’s famous quips. One I shall defer to the end of this essay. The other (sometimes attributed to Disraeli) identifies three species of mendacity, each worse than the one before—lies, damned lies, and statistics. — Stephen Jay Gould,  The Median Isn’t the Message

When I’m told that American institutions could never buckle like this, I point to the little-understood but immensely powerful immigration courts on which I have been reporting for years. Not only are their judges appointed by the attorney general and answer to a given administration, but these officials end up shaping much of our immigration policy from their respective benches. And with its long waiting lists and secretive arrests, the system is being used as a tool to whip up hysteria against the immigrants.  For four days, Trump terrorized the Central American and Mexican communities with the mere threat of mass arrests. And in the process, he incited fear and hatred among supporters who chanted “send her back” during his most recent rally in North Carolina. All of this adds up to an assault on immigrants, people of color and our constitutional rights. — Trump’s Mendacity Is a Threat to Public Safety

 Videos of the Day:

Airline Caterers Authorize Strike Action, Supported by Presidential Candidates

Israel Demolishes 70 More Palestinian Apartments in East Jerusalem 

Toronto Temp Workers Organize in City’s Poorest Neighborhood

 U.S.:

The United States is not a Democracy (A government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly)! Only the 1%, through their ownership of the Republicrats and who profit from war and the war budget, vote for War and the war budget — A policy, which Gore Vidal called a  Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.— The 99% Should Decide On War — Not Just The 1% Who Profit From War!  Under a Democracy, The 99% would have the right to vote on the policy of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace!

The Demobilization of Americans Is a Surreal Tragedy If you had told me that, in those years to come, the American military would be an “all-volunteer” one, essentially a kind of foreign legion, and that those who chose not to be part of it would endlessly “thank” the volunteers for their service while otherwise continuing their lives as if nothing were going on, I wouldn’t have believed you. If you had also pointed out that economic inequality in America would reach levels that might have staggered denizens of the Gilded Age, that three Americans would possess the same wealth as the bottom half of society, that a CEO would, on average, make at least 361 timesthe income of a worker, and that for years there would be no genuine protest around any of this, I would have considered it un-American. If, in those same years, you had assured me that, in our future, thanks to a crucial Supreme Court decision, so much of the money that had gushed up to the wealthiest 1%, or even .01%, of Americans would be funneled back, big time, into what still passed for American democracy, I would have been stunned. That a 1% version of politics would essentially pave the way for a billionaire to enter the White House, and that, until the arrival of Bernie Sanders in 2016, protest over all this would barely be discernable, I certainly wouldn’t have believed you. In sum, I would have been amazed at the way, whatever the subject, Americans had essentially been demobilized (or perhaps demobilized themselves) in the twenty-first century, somehow convinced that there was nothing to be done that would change anything. There was no antiwar movement in the streets, unions had been largely defanged, and even the supposed “fascist” in the White House would have no interest in launching a true movement of his own. If anything, his much-discussed “base” would actually be a set of “fans” wearing red MAGA hats and waiting to fill stadiums for the Trump Show, the same way you’d wait for a program to come on TV. By Tom EngelhardtPolicy Changes on Asylum Penalize Those Who Followed the RulesThe Trump administration has long said that there’s a right way to seek asylum in the United States: Come to an official port of entry at the border, then invoke the right under U.S. law to humanitarian protection. But now, thousands of people are being barred from the U.S. precisely because they followed those rules. Under an administration policy issued last week, most migrants who’ve passed through a third country — say, Mexico — will not even be allowed to request asylum at official border crossings. That includes thousands of asylum-seekers — from countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Cameroon — who were already waiting at Mexican border towns to gain entry to U.S. ports when the new rule took effect. By Dara LindAn American Tragedy: Empire at Home and Abroad
Empires in decline tend to behave badly. Indeed, whether British, French or Russian, the twilight years of imperialism often brought brutal repression of subjects abroad, the suppression of civil liberties at home and general varieties of brutality toward foreigners, be they refugees or migrants. The British built concentration camps and killed tens of thousands in Kenya during the 1950s Mau Mau rebellion. The French tortured and killed subjects in Algeria and nearly lost their own democracy in the process. The Russians slaughtered Afghans and then Chechens as the Soviet empire crumbled and transitioned to a truncated federation. As with these once-vast European empires, so it is with the United States in the 21st century.  The 18 or so years of war following the 9/11 attacks have seen this ostensible republic sink to new lows of behavior. Aggressive wars of choice have ushered in rampant torture, atrocities in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, drone assassinations, warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance of the citizenry, militarization of local police and now, migrant children in cages. As a child myself, educated in public schools that peddled the dangerous myth of American exceptionalism, I never imagined a day when my government would separate refugee children from their parents and then argue, straight-faced, in court, that the detained kids aren’t entitled to soap or toothbrushes. Yet here we are. By Maj. Danny SjursenUS Sanctions Chinese State-Run Energy Company Over Iranian OilThe Trump administration announced on Monday that they were sanctioning the Chinese state-run energy company Zhuhai Zhenrong Co Ltd. for allegedly violating restrictions imposed on Iran’s oil sector. The announcement, which was made by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, addressed the prohibition of Iranian oil without a waiver provided by Washington.

Environment:

Civil Rights/Black Liberation:

Trump’s Message: US is White Man’s Country(Audio) Donald Trump’s racist attacks on immigrants and “The Squad” are designed to tell his base that the US is a White Man’s Country and he is the president who’s going to keep it that way,” said Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford.By Glen Ford , BAR executive editorFreedom Rider: The Russians are Coming, for Kamala Harris The lightweight senator hopes voters will let her party off the hook for its failures if the word Russia is repeated often enough. “She has gotten away with spewing foolishness and telling black people that they didn’t really support Colin Kaepernick as much as they thought.” Kamala Harris seems to love the Russiagate narrative more than any of the other Democratic Party presidential candidates. The lightweight senator who made a name for herself as a jailer of black people has to distract voters from her troubling history. The Russian bogeyman is a perfect fit. She is no different from the rest of the Democratic Party in pushing the phony tale but she seems to have a peculiar predilection for going where others will not. In so doing she tells outrageous lies about black people and their experience in this country. By Margaret Kimberley , BAR editor and senior columnist Kamala Harris Embodies the Most Dangerous Myth of American Exceptionalism Harris loves apartheid Israel and throwing Black people in prison, which makes her a perfect Black corporate Democrat. “Diversity preserves the architecture of empire by painting it with an ebony hue.” Recent developments in the Democratic Party’s ongoing effort to neutralize its left-leaning base have exposed the most dangerous myth of American Exceptionalism. This myth is embodied in the electoral campaign of Kamala Harris and assumes that the Democratic Party is the engine of diversity and inclusion in America. Diversity and inclusion are prominent buzz words in the Democratic Party milieu, especially within major universities and non-profits organizations. They preserve the architecture of empire by painting it with an ebony hue or the hue of whichever oppressed and exploited sector of society requires “representation” within the existing structures of the system. Such representation, however, comes without the power necessary for oppressed people, especially Black America, to determine their own destinies and transform the miserable conditions imposed upon them by the very forces directing the diversity regime.By Danny Haiphong , BAR contributor“Election Meddling Command Posts” from CNN to Yahoo News and the DNC   In their hysteria to scapegoat Russia and Julian Assange for all that’s wrong with the US, the corporate press and politicos have made themselves look ridiculous. “The CNN narrative is especially un-compelling.”  I confess. I meddled in the 2016 election. I was running the Berkeley satellite of Julian Assange’s election meddling headquarters and command post in Ecuador’s London embassy. My friend Madame Blavatsky was running another on the astral plane. She projected the “Stein/Baraka” sticker on my laptop all over the planet and sowed racial division by casting a spell on the Black NFL players who knelt, locked arms, or raised fists to protest police murders of unarmed Black people. She helped Vladimir Putin whisper in Donald Trump’s ear at his Rust Belt rallies. Together they deceived Americans once employed by industries who now outsource all their labor to the most beaten-up, desperate corners of the world. They convinced those still living in half-dead Rust Belt cities and towns that Bill Clinton and NAFTA abandoned them there and then sent opium dealers to help them commit suicide. By Ann Garrison , BAR contributorWe’ve Ben Here Before: Learning From the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee We need to stick to a radical, principled, intersectional, anti-imperialist political orientation that trusts in the power of the people to make history. “SNCC built a people-centered, radically democratic organization that put those most affected at the center, especially youth and students.” “My great fear is that we are all suffering from amnesia. I wrote to recover the memory of the human rainbow, which is in danger of being mutilated…It’s not a person. It’s a system of power that is always deciding in the name of humanity who deserves to be remembered and who deserves to be forgotten…We are much more than we are told. We are much more beautiful.”— Eduardo Galeano,Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist By Paul McLennanKamala Harris Claims Russia, Not US Racism, Behind Kaepernick Furor The former career prosecutor sees Russians everywhere, but can’t recognize white supremacy. “The FBI opened a file on Malcolm X in 1950, claiming he was a Red.” Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris claimed that the furor surrounding San Francisco 49ers star Colin Kaepernick’s protest was artificially generated by Russia. “Remember bend the knee and Colin Kaepernick?” she said  on influential New York-based radio show The Breakfast Club, “it actually was not a thing. The Russian bots started taking that over.” By Alan MacLeodCommunity Control Over Police: A Proposition  Local districts could vote out their current police force and randomly selected residents would oversee the community’s new security arrangement. “We are no longer satisfied with the ability to review abuses of our communities, we are in pursuit of the power to end those abuses.”   Introduction   While it might be fair to say that the police enjoy support among the majority of the white population, the police enjoy no such support among the majority of Black people, who endure more frequent and harsher interactions with cops than whites. By Max RameauWhat Role for the Black American Left on Sudan?  The American website Black Agenda Report commented on the protests in Sudan and got it completely wrong. In the wake of former Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir’s fall from power in April 2019, the Black Agenda Report (BAR)—one of the oldest and most respected Left black online publications (including a podcast) in the United States—published its first analysis of the uprisings that had been growing in Sudan since December 2018. The BAR published an article entitled “Saudi Arabia, Israel, US all Sought Bashir’s Ouster: So how Real was the Sudan Revolution?,” by a Chile-based journalist, Whitney Webb, who suggested that the uprising had merely been manufactured by Saudi Arabia, the US, and Israel. As a a BAR listener and a Pan-Africanist, I was disappointed both by the fact that BAR took so long to offer analysis on the events in Sudan, and by the simplicity of the analysis itself. By Zachary Mondesire

Zionism and Global African Studies Delegates to a conference on Global Africa at Oxford University say Zionists and their apologists are targeting the academy. “An international academic conference on Global Africa was co-opted into a project to legitimize the settler-colonial, apartheid state of Israel.” On June 27 and 28 of this year, we attended a conference titled “Racialization and Publicness in Africa and the African Diaspora,” hosted by Oxford University’s Africa Studies Center and their School of Global and Area Studies. The conference was held to “address the contemporary problem of racialization in Africa and the African Diaspora.” Organizers wanted to explore how “people of African descent are racialized… [and] why and how racial identities and categories are constructed, imagined and inscribed (in)to the social, political and economic processes, practices and relationships in Africa and the African Diaspora.” By , Peter James Hudson, Zachary Mondesire, Corinna Mullin, Jemima PierreBlack Masculinity Under Racial Capitalism  A truly radical counterhegemony can only be realized by disassociating both blackness and manhood from capitalist registers of worth. “Through Consumerism and commodification, black men paradoxically are transformed into iconic figures of success within the fantasy of late capitalism.” In the photograph Branded Head (2003), the shape of a black man’s clean-shaven head gracefully curves against a plain white background. The subject’s face—and with it all the features that might have identified him—is outside of the frame. The viewer’s attention is drawn instead to a keloid several inches above his ear in the shape of the Nike swoosh. The man is branded. By Jordanna MatlonVictory for DC Tenants in Catholic Church-Owned BuildingsTenants fight back and win in the city with the nation’s highest rate of gentrification, by far. “A community developer has signed a contract committing to work with the tenants and not displace them.” After months of negotiations between the Basilica Tenants Associations, their Legal Aid attorneys, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, and local developers, residents have secured a major victory, and prevented the displacement of working class families at three buildings — a feat that seemed impossible just a few months ago. By Yasmina MrabetThe Lasalin Massacre and the Human Rights Crisis in Haiti  The Lasalin massacre was designed to punish and destroy a neighborhood long known as a stronghold of the grassroots opposition. “We found a clear pattern of paramilitaries/death squads being armed and abetted by the government in order to terrorize the population.”  Introduction  On November 13, 2018, police and other paramilitary personnel entered the neighborhood of Lasalin in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. What followed was a massacre of the civilian population. Buildings, including schools, were fired upon and destroyed, people were injured and killed, with some burned alive, women were sexually assaulted and raped and hundreds were forcibly displaced from homes. Bodies were either burned, taken away to be disappeared, buried, never to be found, or in some cases left to be eaten by dogs and pigs.  By Seth Donnelly and Judith MirkinsonEconomy:

Consumer Price Index Has Been Reconfigured Since Early-1980s So As to Understate Inflation Versus Common Experience

  • CPI no longer measures the cost of maintaining a constant standard of living.
  • CPI no longer measures full inflation for out-of-pocket expenditure.
  • With the misused cover of academic theory, politicians forced significant underreporting of official inflation, so as to cut annual cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security, etc.
  • Use of the CPI to adjust retirement benefits, private income or to set investment goals impairs the ability of retirees, income earners and investors to stay ahead of inflation.
  • Understated inflation used in estimating inflation-adjusted growth has created the illusion of recovery in reported GDP.

World:

Iran hints at ship swap with UK amid de-escalation effortsHassan Rouhani spoke after Iraqi president’s visit to Iran at request of UK defence ministry Iran has indicated it wants to de-escalate the British-Iranian crisis, hinting at swapping two captured tankers. “We do not seek the continuation of tension with some European countries,” Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, said on Wednesday during a weekly cabinet meeting. “If Britain steps away from the wrong actions in Gibraltar, they will receive an appropriate response from Iran.” By Patrick WintourWith Pakistan’s Prime Minister at His Side:  Trump Threatens To Wipe Afghanistan “Off The Face of the Earth”US President Donald Trump threatened to “kill 10 million” Afghans in “a week” so as to win a quick victory in America’s longest war, at a joint White House press conference Monday with Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister. The US Commander-in-Chief cavalierly boasted that he could wipe Afghanistan “off the face of the Earth” if he wanted. But he said that he prefers to “extricate” the US from the eighteen-year-long Afghan War and expects Pakistan to facilitate this by helping secure a “settlement” with the Taliban. By Sampath Perera and Keith Jones

The “Mother of all bombs” dropped in Afghanistan

 Health, Education, and Welfare:

The government of the United States can pass laws in a few days to spend tens of trillions of dollars for war and the bailout of Wall Street and the bankers. Yet, those who ‘govern’, pass universal healthcare for themselves, but they cannot spend even one trillion dollars for universal health for those who are ‘governed’! This is what is considered, by the powers the to be,  a democracy and part of the democratic way. — Roland Sheppard, Let The People Vote on Healthcare!

It turns out Cuba has this incredible healthcare system for a very poor country.  — Michael Moore

 Cuba Has Nine Medical Doctors for Every Thousand InhabitantsCuba ranks among the countries with the best indicators in this field Cuba has more than 100,000 medical doctors in active practice, the highest figure in its history. With a ratio of 9 doctors per one thousand inhabitants, the island ranks with the countries in the world with the best indicators in this field. In remarks quoted by the Cuban News Agency (CNA), Public Health Minister José Ángel Portal Miranda said that since the triumph of the Revolution, when only three thousand doctors stayed on the island, until the most recent graduation of Havana’s University of Medical Sciences, more than 376 thousand health professionals have been trained in Cuba.