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Images of the Day:
The Price of Being in Debt — Debtors Prison Once Again Raise Their Head: If You Lost Your Job and Can’t Pay Past Debts You Go to the Prison Industrial Complex You Go!
Nearly two centuries ago, the United States formally abolished the incarceration of people who failed to pay off debts. Yet, recent years have witnessed the rise of modern-day debtors’ prisons — the arrest and jailing of poor people for failure to pay legal debts they can never hope to afford, through criminal justice procedures that violate their most basic rights. — Debtors’ Prisons
An accurate description of the Soviet bureaucracy was written by Leon Trotsky in The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International exactly 50 years ago. Trotsky wrote: “The Soviet Union emerged from the October Revolution as a workers’ state. State ownership of the means of production, a necessary prerequisite to socialist development, opened up the possibility of a rapid growth of the productive forces. But the apparatus of the workers’ state underwent a complete degeneration at the same time: It was transformed from a weapon of the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class and more and more a weapon for the sabotage of the country’s economy. … The bureaucratization of a backward and isolated workers’ state and the transformation of the bureaucracy into an all- powerful privileged cast constitute the most convincing refutation—not only theoretically but this time practically—of the theory of socialism in one country. The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a degenerated workers’ state. Such is the social diagnosis. The political prognosis has an alternative character: Either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism. . . .” Gorbachev’s economic reforms clearly reveal the bureaucracy’s role as the transmission belt of the world capitalist class inside the workers’ state. They represent a danger to the soviet workers and to the soviet workers’ state. — Party congress backs Gorbachev’s ‘reforms’
A recent study show that, under the Pentagon’s 1033 program, enacted in 1997, the value of military weapons, gear and equipment transferred to local cops did not exceed $34 million annually until 2010, the second year of the Obama administration, when it nearly tripled to more than $91 million. By 2014, the year that Michael Brown was shot down – and when the full Congress, including 32 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, rejected a bill that would have shut down the 1033 program – Obama was sending three quarters of a billion dollars, more than $787 million a year, in battlefield weaponry to local police departments. In other words, President Obama oversaw a 24-fold (2,400%) increase in the militarization of local police between 2008 and 2014. Even with the scale-back announced in 2015, Obama still managed to transfer a $459 million arsenal to the cops – 14 times as much weapons of terror and death than President Bush gifted to local police at his high point year of 2008. This was not simply a “surge” in militarization of the police; Obama escalated the war against Black and brown communities by several orders of magnitude. Based on these numbers, Obama is the biggest domestic war hawk in the history of the United States – bigger than Bush, Clinton and all his predecessors since the genesis of the Black mass incarceration regime in the late Sixties.
No wonder all it took was a conversation with two police organizations, this month, to put Obama back on the urban warpath. His return to full combat domestic mode is not an exaggerated response to the death of eight cops in Baton Rouge and Dallas — that was only an excuse to reinstate his original Order of Battle. Obama came into office with the intention of vastly reinforcing the two-generations-long siege of Black America, but was temporarily chastened by the emergence of a resistance movement during his second term. Now he’s preparing to double-down on the strategy by setting a new bar for the politicians that will follow him into the Oval Office: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Such is the legacy of the First Black President. — Glen Ford, Truthdig: Obama to Reinforce the Militarized Police Occupation of Black America
Videos of the Day:
U.S.
Will Russia Reject Neoliberalism? According to various reports, the Russian government is reconsidering the neoliberal policy that has served Russia so badly since the collapse of the Soviet Union. If Russia had adopted an intelligent economic policy, its economy would be far ahead of where it stands today. It would have avoided most of the capital flight to the West by relying on self-finance. by Paul Craig Roberts – Michael Hudson
Party congress backs Gorbachev’s ‘reforms’ by Roland Sheppard August 1988 
Environment:
Ongoing/Big Energy Disasters:
Grounded 17,000-Ton Oil Rig Leaking Diesel Near Rare North Sea Habitat “Lessons from this incident will need to be learnt, and quickly,” warns environmentalist, “with further decommissioning of North Sea rigs expected and climate change expected to create more powerful storms and difficult seas.” By Lauren McCauley 
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Truthdig: Obama to Reinforce the Militarized Police Occupation of Black America Black activists confronted police terror on the cops’ own turf, in late July, with actions at the Washington, DC, lobbying offices of the Fraternal Order of Police and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association headquarters in New York City. In stark defiance of demands that they stand down in the wake of the killings of eight police officers in Baton Rouge and Dallas, Black Youth Project 100 and Black Lives Matter took the struggle to the very doorsteps of police political power: their unions, the bargaining and lobbying powerhouses that have erected interlocking legal walls of impunity around cops, making them the most protected “class” in the nation By Glen Ford 
DOJ Report on Baltimore Police Is ‘Stunning Catalog of Discrimination” The findings lay bare the harsh reality of discriminatory policing in a major American city’ by Deirdre Fulton
Labor:
Economy:
World:
Big Banks and Big Insurers Send Scary Signals There’s something big and scary going on behind the scenes but, as usual, the public isn’t reading about it on the front pages of the newspapers. Yesterday, the broad stock market, as measured by the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index, declined a modest 0.29 percent while big Wall Street banks like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase fell by triple that amount. Bank of America, which bought the big retail brokerage firm, Merrill Lynch, in the midst of the 2008 crash, fell by 8.6 times the rate of the decline in the S&P to give up 2.50 percent. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens 
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
Austerity is The Global Repression of the Exploited and the Oppressed
Quotes of the Day:
Ferguson-Area Cities “Terrorizing” Poor Through Modern-Day Debtors’ Prisons: Federal Lawsuit We can’t “hold people in jail because they’re too poor to pay a debt,” says lawyer byAndrea Germanos 
Rampaging Debt Collectors Are Committing Highway Robbery Thousands of Americans are being hounded mercilessly for debts they don’t owe. By Jim Hightower
Jeremy wants a fully public, well-funded NHS – one of Labour’s greatest achievements in this country. 
