Daily News Digest July 28, 2023
Images of the Day:
Mike Luckovich: Gettin’ Hotter 
Capitalism is Now a Worldwide Threat to Humanity! It is on the Fast Track to Global Warming and/or Nuclear War Catastrophes!
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 the Banner Headline: “There Is No Peace”, is Still True for Today’s World!
Capitalism as a Failed System: World Capitalism Has Been Aware of the Comming Catastrophe of Global Warming Over 5 Decades Ago and Did Nothing!: Under Capitalism — Human Lives Don’t Matter Capitalism Does Not, and Never Has, Worked for the Masses! In Its Death Agony, Capitalism Is Traveling About The World Like The Four Horsemen of the The Apocalypse, Spreading Racism, War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. The very future of Humanity Is Now At stake!
During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three-Point Political Program: 1. Austerity,2. Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and 3. The Iron Heel! For Decades, Blacks Have Been Subjected to The Iron Heel! Currently, the US Capitalist Class is Divided Over When — Not If, to Apply It to Everyone!
Due to Years of Austerity, Cuts to Public Health Care, And An Anti-Science and Profiteering President, The United States Now Leads the World In Coronavirus Cases and Deaths in the World!
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, that the 99% Will Rule, Not the Few!
Quotes of the Day:
“The Judas Factor”: In dramatic contrast to Perry’s and Friedly’s conclusions about Malcolm X’s assassination, is a book by Washington Post staff writer Karl Evanzz titled, The Judas Factor (Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 1992. 389 pp., $22.95). In this book, Evanzz documents how the intelligence community, the CIA, the FBI, and the New York Police Bureau of Special Services (BOSSI) using agents provocateurs and infiltrators; set the stage for the assassination of Malcolm X. It outlines the motives for their actions. Evanzz spent 15 years researching over 300,000 pages of declassified FBI and CIA documents. From Page 214 of The Judas Factor: (A few days after Malcolm X’s press conference announcing his split from the NOI) “William C. Sullivan (FBI) contacted the directors of BOSSI and asked them to recruit several African Americans to infiltrate Malcolm X’s new organization. Among the directors at the time were two men who later would play key roles in the scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation: Anthony Ulasewicz, the infamous bagman of Watergate, and Nixon advisor John J. Caulfield — Why the U.S. Government Assassinated Malcolm X and Martin By-Luther King, Jr. By Roland Sheppard
Podcasts/Vidoes of the Day:
Democracy Now!: New Witness to Malcolm X Assassination Says He Heard Police Ask If Killer Was “With Us”
Cornel West on Capitalism, Ukraine, and His Presidential Run | The Chris Hedges Report
Environment:
After World War II Rosa Luxenburg Coined the Slogan: ‘S0cialism or Barbaism’! Now the Slogan Should Be: ‘Ecosocialism or Ecocide’!
One of Many Ways to Begin to End Global Warming: Expose ‘Greenwashing’ — Tax the Polluters 100%!
UN Ignores Sustainable Farming While Prioritizing Big Ag Small-scale farmers and Indigenous groups say they have again been shut out of the UN Food Systems Summit.
As Planet Burns, Shell Reports $5 Billion in Profits and Plans to Ramp Up Fossil Fuels “Every house burnt to the ground, every town forced to evacuate, every ecosystem lost to a wildfire is a necessary consequence of a business model like Shell’s.” With much of the world reeling from record-shattering heat and devastating wildfires, the London-based oil giant Shell is poised to ramp up its investments in planet-warming fossil fuels after ditching its plan to cut oil production.
Outrage as Alaska Attorney General Asks Supreme Court to Reverse EPA’s Pebble Mine Veto One coalition described the Republican attorney general’s lawsuit as “little more than a publicity stunt filed on behalf of an unscrupulous mining company.” The state of Alaska on Wednesday bypassed the lower courts and directly asked the U.S. Supreme Court to undo the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision earlier this year to prohibit the construction of Pebble Mine, a proposed copper and gold project that conservationists say would be disastrous for Bristol Bay
Green Groups Tell Biden to Stop Approving Fossil Fuel Projects If He Really Wants to Cut Methane “Promoting more fracking and increasing fossil fuel exports are not the actions of an administration that is serious about climate,” said one activist. As the Biden administration on Wednesday convened the first-ever White House Methane Summit, advocacy groups stressed that actually combating the potent pollutant’s significant contribution to the global climate emergency requires ditching fossil fuels.
United States:
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. Tax the Rich! — They Can Afford To Pay! Both Parties Support U.S. Capitalism’s Wars! (The Only War the Democrats Opposed was the Civil War!)
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. — Louis D. Brandeis Quotes
The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. MLK, Beyond Vietnam
A Vote for Trump or Biden is a Vote for Ecocide!
Book Review: ‘Why the U.S. Government Assassinated Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.’ Review by Roger Hollander of the book by Roland Sheppard, just published by ReMarx Publishing
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.
New Evidence Surfaces That 303 Creative Owner Misled SCOTUS Conservative justices sided with 303 Creative, ruling that businesses had a First Amendment right to discriminate Apetitioner in the recent U.S. Supreme Court case that overturned anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people in Colorado appears to have misled the Court regarding key facts in the case. Lorie Smith, who owns the website production company 303 Creative, was represented in the case by the far right legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). In their filing to the Court, Smith and ADF claimed that a Colorado law barring businesses from discriminating against LGBTQ residents had rendered her unable to perform certain functions within her business, particularly creating wedding websites, as she didn’t Want To Make Websites For Same-Sex Couples.
Civil Rights/Blackliberation:
I Witnessed the Assassination: My Essays On Malcolm X’s Assiassnation:
The Assassinations of M.L.K. Jr. and Malcolm X
The Day the Music Died: Malcolm X’s Assassination, Feb. 21, 1965
Why the Government Assassinated Malcolm X And Martin Luther King Jr.
- Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist Censorship of the Black Left
- Editors, The Black Agenda Review SPEECH: French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara, Tawia Adamafio, 1960
- Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor Virtual Slave Labor in Congo’s Cobalt Mines
- Clau O’Brien Moscoso Peruvians Take Over Lima, Continuing to Pressure Boluarte Coup Regime
- Caribbean Popular Organizations Caribbean Popular Organizations: We Must Raise Our Voices to Defend Our Region!
- Socialist Workers Movement of the Dominican Republic Stop the Dominican Government’s Violence and
Jody Roumain Africa is Burning! DRC in Environmental Crisis - Nick Corbishley Latin America Again Refuses to Fall In Line With the Collective West on Ukraine, This Time from Brussels
Labor:
Economy:
Michael Roberts Facebook Blog: Poverty in Germany i.e the working poor. More than nine million workers in Germany earn just a little more than the minimum wage. 14.8 percent of those in employment receive the minimum wage of twelve euros an hour. 23.35 percent of those in employment in Germany, i.e. 9.3 million of the 39.8 million employees, earn less than 14 euros an hour, just a little more than the minimum wage. Re: Jeder vierte Erwerbstätige verdient weniger als 14 Euro die Stunde
NYS Regulator Fined Deutsche Bank $150 Million Over Ties to Jeffrey Epstein but Says It Doesn’t Have a Scrap of Paper on JPMorgan and the Sex Trafficker On July 5, Wall Street On Parade filed a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request with the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS), the state agency that investigates and penalizes financial institutions for engaging in illicit activities. We were curious as to why the DFS had fined Deutsche Bank upwards of $150 million on July 7, 2020 for its illicit dealings with the sex trafficker of underage girls, Jeffrey Epstein, but had remained silent on any investigations or fines against JPMorgan Chase.
World:
After Brexit: the State of the United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party in the United Kingdom suffered serious setbacks in three byelections on July 20, 2023. In Selby and Ainsty in northern England, the main opposition Labour Party overturned a Conservative majority of more than 20,000 to win the seat by some 4,000 votes. The Labour winner was Keir Mather, who at 25 years of age became the youngest MP in the House of Commons. In the southern English constituency of Somerton and Frome, the Liberal Democrat candidate Sarah Dyke overturned a 19,000 Conservative majority and won by an even larger margin of 11,000 votes. And in Uxbridge and South Ruislip in Greater London, former prime minister Boris Johnson’s constituency, the governing party’s candidate Steve Tuckwell barely held on to the seat, winning by fewer than 500 votes.
Thousands of Peruvians Defy Police Violence to Protest Coup Protesters called for Dina Boluarte’s resignation, the closure of the right-wing controlled Congress, and Pedro Castillo’s release. Tens of thousands of Peruvians took to the streets across the country on July 19 to protest the Dina Boluarte coup government. Boluarte assumed the presidency in December following a legislative coup against leftist President Pedro Castillo — who remains in “preventative detention” — after making an alliance with right-wing parties in Congress. Thousands marched to the capital — the third Toma de Lima (Takeover of Lima) since Castillo was ousted — marking the first of 10 days of national action called for by unions and grassroots organisations until Peru’s Independence Day on July 28.
Health. Welfare, and Education:
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, pass universal healthcare for themselves, but cannot spend even one trillion dollars for universal health for those who are ‘governed’! This is what is considered, by the powers to be, a democracy and part of the democratic way. — Roland Sheppard, Let the People Vote on Healthcare