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50 km Stretch of Great Barrier Reef to be Cleared for Coal Ship ‘Express Lane’ In a press conference today the Australian Federal Government has unveiled a plan to clear a 50 km stretch of the Great Barrier Reef to create a coal ship ‘Express Lane.’ The ambitious project will clear a 54 km stretch of coral and marine wildlife to create an obstruction free path between Abbot Point and Pacific Ocean shipping routes to China. By Sally McPherson
Kurds Rejoin Sovereign Syria – US Loses War Justification By Glen Ford , BAR executive editor
Freedom Rider: Trump, Obama and Syria Whether by mistake or design, Donald Trump is presiding over the – agonizing slow – demise of Barack Obama’s illegal and immoral scheme to overthrow the government of Syria using jihadist terror armies. “The unipolar world is no more.” Donald Trump presents more contradictions than perhaps any president in modern history. He is woefully unprepared for this or any other job, having been far less successful as a real estate developer than he claimed. He excels only at promoting himself and identifying with the dark underbelly of white America. Those traits combined with Democratic Party corruption and incompetence to bring him to the presidency. By Margaret Kimberley , BAR editor and senior columnist
Syria: Exposing Western Radical Collaboration with Imperialism “Western radicals must take a consistent anti-imperialist position despite the internal contradictions or problems that existwithin a state in the Global South.” Despite so many self-defined radicals’ reading and claims to understand Gramsci’s corrective to Marxism-Leninism’s mechanistic understanding of the relationship between the base and the ideological superstructure, the ease by which some radicals are manipulated by the crude ideological machinations of the ruling class is truly astonishing. It is quite understandable that liberals would be manipulated by fairly innovative ideological gimmicks like the notion of “humanitarian intervention” and the “responsibility to protect,” which relied on the assumption, proving correct, that the liberal consciousness would react favorably to appeals to oppose “authoritarians” and authoritarian systems. However, I suspect that state propagandists didn’t realize the potential effectiveness of this ideological device when they first began to disseminate this framework for its ability to also mobilize radicals to the side of the bourgeois state and imperialist adventures. By Ajamu Baraka , BAR editor and columnist
Botham Jean and America’s Apartheid Police State The death of Black males under American apartheid is not only absolved by white society but also treated as necessary for the upkeep of the status quo. “The shock troops for the American apartheid regime can depend on the Black misleadership class for protection and safety.” The word apartheid has generally been used to describe South Africa up until 1994 and most recently Israel’s present colonial arrangement. However, South Africa and Israel received direct support and encouragement from history’s most effective form of apartheid, the United States. The United States, also known as “America,” is an apartheid state—one based on the mass kidnapping African people and the establishment of a white settler regime designed to protect the profits derived from slavery and land theft. Botham Jean is but another victim of the American apartheid police-state. Off duty cop Amber Guyger received ten years in prison for her act of lynching. Whatever real or imagined justice derived from Guyger’s slap on the wrist prison sentence was discredited by the spectacle of forgiveness present at her trial. Brandt Jean’s forgiving testimony and embrace with Guyger gave the corporate media the opportunity to restore white innocence, which is a core assumption of American apartheid’s project of mass Black elimination. By Danny Haiphong, BAR contributor
Solidarity Never? The Battle for WBAI A radio station steeped in generations of progressive battles has, at least temporally, lost its voice. “The shutdown is of particular concern to Pacifica’s Black community.” WBAI is a listener-supported New York City radio station with a 60-year history of radical political dissidence and groundbreaking cultural programming. During the 1960s it was the first to send a reporter to broadcast from North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It was also among the first to give significant air time to Bob Dylan, and it featured the prominent voices of Black liberation including Malcolm X (Not while he was lving.—RS), Dr. Martin Luther King, and members of the Black Panther Party. More recently it has aired the voices of Black Agenda Report writers and editors, and, on Randy Credico’s show “Live on the Fly,” that of Julian Assange before his arrest and incarceration in London’s Belmarsh Prison. By Ann Garrison , BAR contributor
The UAW Strike, Blacks, Unions, and Capitalism The current strike is driven by gross inequalities in earnings among workers, as well as between labor and management. “Labor power gives Blacks more collective power to tackle other societal issues, such as police brutality and gentrification.” Why The Strike? About 51,000 members of the United Auto Workers walked off the job on September 16 against General Motors. General Motors and the striking United Auto Workers union are at opposite ends over these issues. One is how fast to move newer hires up to the top wage and how soon temporary workers should qualify for full employment. Another sticking point is that GM wants employees to pay a larger share of health benefits. A disproportionate number of temps and two-tier workers are black and brown workers. They earn as little as $15 an hour at the beginning of their employment. In comparison, the legacy workers (those working before the two-tier system) make $30 an hour). Now new hires need to work eight years to reach the level of permanent. Even fewer benefits accrue to the temps. The two-tier wage system began in 2007. By Ken Morgan
Russian Pride and US Exceptionalism Russians are keenly aware of the non-stop propaganda campaign waged against their country by the US government and media. “Fifty two percent of Russians are afraid of nuclear war, and 74% of those think the US will attack them.” “The Tsar was not the only tyrant in the world; Capitalism was worse.” — John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World By Riva Enteen
Hurricanes and Other Storms That Uprooted a People The majority of residents in the hurricane-prone countries of the Caribbean are there as a result of a specific centuries-long crime wave, known as the Atlantic Slave Trade. “The unfortunate victims should not be expected to bare the capital, recurrent, and other financial costs of rehabilitation.” This statement is a personal one intended to support opinions, especially in the Caribbean, that the costs of practical recovery from annual hurricanes should not fall, as they mainly do, on the victims of these natural disasters. As it is, the pain, the agony, the distress, the abandonment, the unpredictable fatalities and other psychological costs of re-organizing and re-establishing their homes, their communities and their livelihoods are borne logically by the residents of the hurricane-prone countries. It is the argument of this statement that the unfortunate victims should not be expected to bare the capital, recurrent, and other financial costs of rehabilitation after these more and more ruinous disasters. By Eusi Kwayana
Justice for Atatiana, Abolish Police Domestic Terrorism Terror in blue: a white cop shoots through a window to kill a young Black woman playing video games with her nephew.“Black folks who reach out for ‘help’ and ‘assistance’ from the police either wind up dead themselves or inadvertently cause another Black person to be killed. She was a young, Black female professional and daughter with a vibrant life and blossoming career, cut down in four seconds in an act of domestic terrorism that has devastated a multi-generational family. On a Saturday morning, twenty-eight year-old Atatiana Jefferson was murdered in cold blood in her home by a white Fort Worth, Texas police officer responding to a neighbor’s request for a “welfare check.”. The police officer yelled for Jefferson to put her hand up through a window, then fired his weapon four seconds later. By Sikivu Hutchinson
Labor:
Shadow Government Statistics Alternate Gross Domestic Product Chart The SGS-Alternate GDP reflects the inflation-adjusted, or real, year-to-year GDP change, adjusted for distortions in government inflation usage and methodological changes that have resulted in a built-in upside bias to official reporting.