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Laura Gray’s cartoon from the page of The Militant August 18, 1945, under banner headline: “There Is No Peace”
During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three-Point Political Program:
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Austerity,
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Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and
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Always Remember: That President Obama, With a Majority Democrat Legislature Supported the Wall Street Bailout and Remember, That he Established, in writing, the United States Capitalist Austerity Program. — The Race to the Bottom/Pauperization of the 99%!
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 , thet the 99% Will Rule, Not the Few!
Image Of the Day:
Building Power Together: Rise Against Militarism, Racism and the Climate Crisis A National Conference, hosted by The United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) February 21-23, 2020 The People’s Forum 320 West 37th Street New York, NY 10018 (between 8th & 9th Avenues)
Quote of the Day:
There are many things that Michael Bloomberg has in common with Donald Trump — the antithesis of what most Democrats want to elect. Both are multi-billionaires; both have secret non-disclosure agreements with women who have accused them of sexual harassment; both have multi-billion-dollar private businesses which make no public filings, thus posing insurmountable conflicts of interest. In Bloomberg’s case, the bulk of his $61.5 billion net worth comes from leasing out his data terminals to Wall Street’s trading floors around the globe. At a time when Wall Street is looking more dangerous than ever and is in desperate need of reform, is Michael Bloomberg really going to bite the hand that feeds him? — Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Videos of the Day:
Quotes of the Day:
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 United States takes from the poor and gives to the Rich.
‘Our Institutions Are Sounding Alarms’: Federal Judges Call Emergency Meeting Over Trump Interference With DOJ “This is mind-blowing. I’ve never heard of anything like it. We are in full on crisis mode.” The head of the 1,100-member Federal Judges Association on Monday called an emergency meeting amid concerns over President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr’s use of the power of the Justice Department for political purposes, such as protecting a long-time friend and confidant of the president. The emergency meeting—announced Monday by Philadelphia-based U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe, the head of the group—was described by legal analysts as an unusual and “extraordinary” step. “This is mind-blowing. I’ve never heard of anything like it,” tweeted former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman. “We are in full-on crisis mode.” By Jake Johnson
Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders: Sheepdogging for Hillary and the Democrats Vermont senator and ostensible socialist Bernie Sanders is playing the sheepdog candidate for Hillary Clinton this year. Bernie’s job is to warm up the crowd for Hillary, herding activist energies and the disaffected left back into the Democratic fold one more time. Bernie aims to tie up activist energies and resources till the summer of 2016 when the only remaining choice will be the usual lesser of two evils. “The sheepdog is a card the Democratic party plays every presidential primary season when there’s no White House Democrat running for re-election.” Spoiler alert: we have seen the Bernie Sanders show before, and we know exactly how it ends. Bernie has zero likelihood of winning the Democratic nomination for president over Hillary Clinton. Bernie will lose, Hillary will win. When Bernie folds his tent in the summer of 2016, the money, the hopes and prayers, the year of activist zeal that folks put behind Bernie Sanders’ either vanishes into thin air, or directly benefits the Hillary Clinton campaign. Bruce A. Dixon, BAR managing editor 07 May 2015
Is Martial Law Coming to the United States?
‘These are the Bad Times’: Trump to Deploy Heavily Armed Border Patrol Tactical Units to Help With Immigration Arrests in Sanctuary Cities “It is unbelievable how much this action will undermine public safety. Unbelievable.” In a move that appears destined to escalate tension between the White House and opponents, President Donald Trump is reportedly deploying Customs and Border Protection tactical units across sanctuary cities in the U.S. to assist with arrests of undocumented people—despite warnings from critics and rights advocates. The New York Times reported on the plan Friday afternoon, citing an official who received an email describing the weekend deployment who read the text to reporters over the phone. CBP spokesman Lawrence Payne confirmed the details.”These are the bad times,” data researcher Michael Caley tweeted of the report. By Eoin Higgins
Detroit Bad Water and Overtaxed: Detroit Overtaxed Residents by $600M, Causing Foreclosure Crisis. Residents Are Now Fighting Back In Detroit, a showdown between progressive lawmakers and the city is taking on racist housing policies that robbed African Americans in Detroit of their homes and widened the racial wealth gap. On Thursday, the Coalition for Property Tax Justice announced a class-action lawsuit against the city of Detroit, Wayne County and the state of Michigan in response to unfair property tax foreclosures. One in four Detroit properties have been subject to property tax foreclosure, a level comparable only to tax foreclosure rates during the Great Depression.
UN Condemns ‘Shocking’ and ‘Terrible’ US-Backed Saudi Coalition Bombing That Killed 31 Yemeni Civilians “Those who continue to sell arms to the warring parties must realize that by supplying weapons for this war, they contribute to making atrocities like today’s all too common.” By Jake Johnson
The New Rules of the Game The quadrennial political game of least worst, or how to scare the public to vote for presidential candidates who serve corporate power, comes this season with a new twist. Donald Trump, if he faces Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar or Michael Bloomberg, will continue to be an amalgamation of Adolf Hitler, Al Capone and the Antichrist. But should Bernie Sanders manage to evade the snares, traps and minefields laid for him by the Democratic Party elites, should he miraculously become the party’s nominee, the game of least worst will radically change. All the terrifying demons that inhabit Trump will be instantly exorcised. But unlike in the biblical story of Jesus driving the demons into a herd of swine, they will be driven into the senator from Vermont. Trump will become the establishment’s reluctant least worse option. Sanders will become a leper. The Democratic and Republican party elites, joining forces as they did in the 1972 presidential election, will do to Sanders what they did to George McGovern, who lost in 49 of the 50 states. By Chris Hedges
How the UN’s Middle East Peace Plan Was Trounced by Its Own Members Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has delivered a dramatic condemnation of the U.S.-drafted Middle East peace plan. No country, except Israel, has approved of the proposals at any public forum. Still, several nations around the world want the Palestinians to use the plan as a means of reopening negotiations with Israel by presenting its own vision. Still, several nations around the world want the Palestinians to use the plan as a means of reopening negotiations with Israel by presenting its own vision. By Evelyn Leopold
Environment:
Germany Is Planning Free Public Transit to Fight Air Pollution This represents a surprising shift for Germany. Germany is a global leader in wind and solar power, but air pollution throughout the country has gotten so bad that the European Union just threatened the country with massive fines if the life-threatening situation wasn’t rapidly addressed, according to the Independent. Rather than fight the decree, the German government announced earlier this week a bold new plan to clean up the atmosphere: free public transit. In a letter to the European Commission, government ministers laid out their plan. By Joe McCarthy
Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:
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Mumia Marks Release of Chuck Africa The nation’s best known political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal, was jubilant at the release of Chuck Africa, at 59 the last of the Move 9 members to leave prison after conviction in the 1978 death of a Philadelphia policeman. Mumia called Chuck Africa “one of the feistiest” of the Move 9 members, two of whom died in prison. Abu Jamal has been imprisoned since 1981 in the death of another Philadelphia cop.
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US Must Build Housing on a Bigger Scale than the New Deal Organizer Tara Raghuveer, whose Kansas City Tenants group won passage of a Tenants Bill of Rights, said “One of our central demands is to return to treating housing as a public good rather than a commodity. The government must build and manage housing like never before, even beyond the scale that was seen during the New Deal era.”
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Abolish Schooling As We Know It Public schools in Black America are part of the mass incarceration system, said David Stovall, a professor of African American Studies and Criminology at the University of Illinois, in Chicago. “If you have this heavily funded carceral system, and a schooling system that is substandard, they fuel each other,” said Stovall, who wrote an article calling for school abolition in the Journal of Culture and Education. Stovall distinguishes between order-oriented schooling and genuine education.
“The U.S. Government also feared Malcolm X’s growing international stature.”
The question of who ordered the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. is a vital one, and thousands of pages have been written on the issue. Those who dismiss the notion that the United States government would engage in assassination — by characterizing those who believe this as “conspiracy nuts” — willfully ignore the 1975 Church Committee Report that exposed covert, illegal government activities and the many CIA-orchestrated assassinations and coups d’etat from Africa to Latin America.
The CIA’s experience with overseas assassinations has given it more than enough expertise to conduct domestic assassinations, with the added advantage of having control over investigating agencies at the local, state and national levels.
Deciding criminal guilt is largely based on proving means, motive and opportunity. When it comes to political assassination, the key question is motive.
Powerful government institutions possess, or can easily obtain, the means and the opportunity to conduct an assassination and divert attention to “a lone gunman” or a patsy like Lee Harvey Oswald. The mainstream media conveniently forget this fact as they rush to legitimize wacky theories that take the heat off the CIA, FBI, NSA and police.
In “Why the U.S. Government Assassinated Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Roland Sheppard exposes the U.S. government’s motive for assassinating Malcolm X in New York’s Audubon Ballroom on Feb. 21, 1965, and Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. The fact that Sheppard is one of the few remaining eye witnesses to the assassination of Malcolm X adds a note of immediacy and authenticity to his analysis.
Sheppard describes the unusual absence of security on the day of Malcolm X’s assassination, and he recounts his personal observations of what happened in the crucial moments. He tells of a second suspect apprehended that day by the New York Police, a man whose existence later disappeared from the official version of events.
However, when Sheppard was interrogated at the Harlem Police Station, he saw this man walking freely into one of the offices. Sheppard recognized him as the assassin.
In 1999, the King family launched a civil suit to expose the facts surrounding the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The conclusion: “After considering all the evidence, a Memphis jury ruled that someone other than James Earl Ray had been the shooter … that the City of Memphis, the state of Tennessee and federal government agencies were all involved in the assassination.”
Motive
The heart of Sheppard’s work is his analysis of the motive for these two government assassinations.
There is nothing more threatening to the U.S. corporate elite, the government, the military and the mass media than the prospect of revolution. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were developing beyond their original Black liberation philosophies. They were emerging as powerful advocates and organizers for revolutionary change in the American economic and political system.
In his final years, Malcolm X expanded the fight against racism to include the fight against poverty and war. In 1962, he supported striking hospital workers in New York City. And he was the first mass leader in the United States to publically oppose America’s war against Vietnam.
In his speech at the Oxford Union in 1964, Malcolm X gives Shakespeare a revolutionary twist. He begins with the famous question:
Whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them.
His answer:
And I go for that. If you take up arms you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who’s in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time.
There is nothing more threatening to the U.S. corporate elite, the government, the military and the mass media than the prospect of revolution. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were developing beyond their original Black liberation philosophies. They were emerging as powerful advocates and organizers for revolutionary change in the American economic and political system.
The U.S. government also feared Malcolm X’s growing international stature and the political connections he was making in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Sheppard reminds us that Malcolm X met with Che Guevara and the Cuban delegation to the United Nations in New York, in December of 1964. He was invited by Ahmed Ben Bella, the leader of the Algerian revolution, to participate along with Che and other independence movement leaders at a conference in Bandung beginning March 3, 1965.
He had also arranged for the issue of human rights violations against Afro-Americans to be considered on March 12, 1965, by the International Court of Justice at the Hague. His assassination put an end to all of this. Ben Bella had been assassinated just four months later.
Fighting Words
Martin Luther King Jr. was also beginning to challenge a political system that profits from racism. Sheppard cites King’s speech at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Convention in August 1967:
“Why are there 40 million poor people in America? … (W)hen you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth … (Y)ou begin to question the capitalist economy.”
King pointed out that the Northern liberals, who had given moral and financial support to end Jim Crow laws in the South, would not support the effort to eliminate economic segregation. As Sheppard states: “Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated to subvert the Poor People’s Campaign. King was building a mass movement against poverty, and those who profit from poverty were determined to stop him.”
Martin Luther King Jr. was also beginning to challenge a political system that profits from racism.
King’s opposition to the U.S. war against Vietnam sent shivers down the back of the military-industrial complex. In his historic sermon at the Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967, sometimes referred to as the greatest MLK speech you never heard of, King exclaimed:
Money that should have been spent on Johnson’s War on Poverty was being lost in Vietnam’s killing fields … A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death …We are taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.
King called for a coalition of labor, anti-racist, anti-poverty and anti-war activists; and a united movement poses the greatest threat to the status quo.\
King called for a coalition of labor, anti-racist, anti-poverty and anti-war activists; and a united movement poses the greatest threat to the status quo.
Marxists?
In his book on Malcolm X, George Breitman states, “Malcolm was not yet a Marxist.” A reviewer of Breitman’s work added, “Not yet! But it was only a matter of time.”
Malcolm X wrote:
It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck. Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, then capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.
Martin Luther King Jr. may not have been as far along the road of rejecting capitalism for socialism. Nevertheless, I believe that this was also a matter of time. In a 1966 speech to his staff, King explained: “(S)omething is wrong … with capitalism … There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
The U.S. government was determined that neither of these fighters should be allowed to have that time. However, before moving to assassinate them, it tried to “neutralize” them.
Sheppard describes the activities of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s program to infiltrate, disrupt and destroy the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-Vietnam War movement and any other threat to the status quo.
FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover called King “the most dangerous Negro” and tried to blackmail him into silence. To discredit Malcolm X, the FBI paid an informer inside the Nation of Islam. When these efforts failed, assassination was the final option.
The U.S. government assassinated Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. because they rightly came to understand and challenge the capitalist economic system, its social impact – war, poverty, injustice, environmental disaster – and its reliance on racism to divide and conquer.
Sheppard concludes with an appeal to action; we must learn the truth about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. so we can carry their vision forward and conclude the struggle they so bravely began.
Roland Sheppard describes himself as a retired business representative of Painters Local 4 in San Francisco, a lifelong social activist and socialist. Prior to being elected as a union official in 1994, he worked for 31 years as a house painter. Roland Sheppard’s Daily News is accessible at https://rolandsheppard.com/. Roger Hollander can be reached via Twitter @rhollander.
The Million Man March Has Been Wiped From the History Books. Why? I hate making comparisons. Due to the fact that we live in an either or society, we often neglect how it takes both sides of the scale to keep things balanced. Thing is, it’s not really a comparison.On one hand you have a March that is remembered annually, rehashed in movie after TV show, and is used as a litmus test for one’s values in the 60s. While on the other hand you have a momentous event that has been nearly wiped from the books of history. By mauludSADIQ 
Dear Harriet:
I am glad to know that the story of your eventful life has been written by a kind lady and that the same is soon to be published. You ask for what you do not need when you call upon me for a word of commendation. I need such words from you far more than you can need them from me, especially where your superior labors and devotion to the cause of the lately enslaved of our land are known as I know them. The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day – you in the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scarred, and foot-sore bondmen and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt, “God bless you,” has been your only reward. The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown – of sacred memory – I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have. Much that you have done would seem improbable to those who do not know you as I know you. It is to me a great pleasure and a great privilege to bear testimony for your character and your works and to say to those to whom you may come, that I regard you in every way truthful and trustworthy.
Your friend,
Frederick Douglass
Labor:
Economy:
Fed Slashes 14-Day Repo Loans to $25 Billion; Will Cut Further in March Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell sat through two days of grueling hearings before the House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee last week. At numerous times, the Fed and Powell were portrayed by Congressional members as sugar daddies for Wall Street while aloof to the financial suffering of the average American. (See Fed Chair Tells Congress There Is a 10-Year “Game Plan” to Deal with Financial Crisis But No Plan to Deal with Americans Left Devastated By It.) The House Financial Services Committee held its hearing on Tuesday. The Senate Banking Committee held its hearing on Wednesday. On Thursday, in a surprise move, the Fed announced that it would be trimming the $30 billion it has been making in 14-day loans (at about 1.60 percent interest) to Wall Street’s trading houses to $25 billion through March 12 and trimming that amount even further to $20 billion beginning on March 17. The 14-day loans are made twice a week, typically on Tuesday and Thursday, and are in addition to the daily 1-day loans the Fed has been making every business day to trading houses on Wall Street since September 17 of last year. The 1-day loans currently have a cap of $100 billion per day. By Pam Martens and Russ Marten
World:
Health, Science, 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 ‘governn’, 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!
Black Agenda Radio for Week of February 17, 2020 With Nellie Bailey And Glen Ford