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Images of the Day:
Under Jeremy’s leadership, I believe that we can restore that optimism, people’s faith in the future. So I say this, in the birthplace of John Lennon, it falls to us to inspire people to Imagine again. Imagine the society we can create. It’s a society that’s radically transformed, radically fairer, more equal, more democratic. Yes, based upon a prosperous economy, that’s economically and environmentally sustainable, but where that prosperity is shared by all. That’s our vision to rebuild and transform Britain. In this party you no longer have to whisper its name. It’s called socialism. Solidarity. — John McDonnell blows the roof off the Labour Party conference, in just one minute [VIDEO]
The corporate state needs to create the illusion that the courts and the police are impartial and just. Once this illusion is cemented into the public consciousness, victims can be blamed for their oppression. Institutionalized murder becomes acceptable. Police violence becomes part of the cost of keeping us safe. The oppressed have no legitimacy or voice. The corporate state is interested only in fostering these illusions. Reforms will be, as they have been in the past, cosmetic. What advances have we made since police murdered Michael Brown two years ago in Ferguson? Have the some 200 civilian review boards across the country, most of them toothless and ineffectual, prevented police from gunning down people in our streets or brought the killers to justice? Police have killed over 700 people this year. The illusions of reform are used to alter public consciousness rather than the machinery of corporate power. These illusions are created to reassure us that those that are arrested, beaten, killed or sent away to prison for decades deserve their fate. Yes, the state may admit, there is an abuse committed here or an injustice committed there, but the system itself, the state insists, is fundamentally fair and just. This is a lie the elites go to tremendous lengths to disseminate. The corporate state is counting on counterviolence against police, which is inevitable, and further acts of domestic terrorism, which also are inevitable. Acts of violence directed against the state are used by the organs of state propaganda, including the corporate press, to foster a culture of fear, to deify the police and to demonize the oppressed in our inner cities and in the Middle East. All criticism of excessive state violence, once these illusions dominate the society, will be condemned as disloyal and unpatriotic. The corporate state, until it is destroyed, will do what it is designed to do—kill with impunity. — Chris Hedges, Police Killings Won’t Stop
Videos of the Day:
U.S.
The Trump-Clinton TV debate: Bread and circuses In ancient Rome the ruling class maintained its hold on power by offering the people bread and circuses. Yesterday millions of people watched the first US presidential debate, held at Hofstra University, New York. This was the modern equivalent of the kind of circus that served as a spectacle to divert the attention of the masses from their miserable conditions of existence. by Alan Woods 
Beginning of Worl War III?: Putin Ups the Ante: Ceasefire Sabotage Triggers Major Offensive in Aleppo “Syria is the summation of all the errors of a dysfunctional empire collapsing upon itself. History forgotten. Science ignored. Facts denied. Propaganda cannot hide that West is supporting and killing Islamists at the same time in a World War that risks escalating into a nuclear holocaust.” Vietnam Vet, comments-line, Sic Semper Tyrannis The attack on Deir Ezzor was a flagrant act of betrayal. For the first time in the five year-long war, US warplanes targeted an SAA military outpost killing 62 Syrian regulars. The surprise attacks — which lasted for the better part of an hour and were followed by a coordinated ground assault by members of ISIS– were intended to torpedo the fragile ceasefire agreement and send a message to Moscow that the US was prepared to achieve its strategic objectives in Syria whether it had to launch direct attacks on defenders of the regime or not. by Mike Whitney
Police Killings Won’t Stop The corporate state, no matter how many protests take place in American cities over the murder of unarmed citizens, will put no restraints on the police or the organs of security and surveillance. It will not protect the victims of state violence. It will continue to grant broader powers and greater resources to militarized police departments and internal security forces such as Homeland Security. Force, along with the systems of indoctrination and propaganda, is the last prop that keeps the corporate elites in power. These elites will do nothing to diminish the mechanisms necessary for their control. By Chris Hedges
Big Brother Obama’s Spy Legacy: Over Eight Years, President Barack Obama Has Created the Most Intrusive Surveillance Apparatus in the World. To What End? By James Bamford
Capitalism is not Democracy — Gov. Brown ‘Stuns’ Activists, Signs Anti-Free Speech Bill By Marcy Winograd 
81% of Americans Oppose “Aid” to Israel 
Environment:
The Poisoning and Crumbling of the U.S. Water Infrastructure Continues:
‘Erin Brockovich’ Carcinogen Found in the Drinking Water of More than 75% of Americans — Is Your Water Toxic? 
This guy googled ‘Teflon’ when his dad died. Now his town’s a toxic water contamination site. It was like a bad dream. Michael Hickey, 37, typed “Teflon” and “cancer” into Google on an otherwise unremarkable March day in 2014. A high school teacher in his tiny town of Hoosick Falls, New York, had just died of cancer, and Hickey was thinking about his father, who’d died of kidney cancer the year before. Too much cancer, he thought. It never seemed quite right, his father’s death. He’d never seen his father drink or smoke. He was only 68, relatively young, their doctor said, to have gotten so aggressive a disease. So a few days after the high school teacher died, Hickey typed “Teflon” and “cancer” into Google. Teflon is big business in Hoosick Falls: Manufacturers began making Teflon products there in 1955, and a local factory owned by multinational corporation Saint-Gobain now employed about 200 in the town of 3,400. The Saint-Gobain factory is about 300 yards from the underground wells that supply water to the village. Hickey’s father’s house was on the same street. By Zoë Schlanger 
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Black Liberation/ Civil Rights:
Prison Strike Against Slave Labor Continues: Despite a near-total lack of corporate media coverage, the national prison strike that began September 9 continues at facilities in 11 states, said Pastor Kenneth Glascow, chief outside spokesperson for the Free Alabama Movement, centered at the state prison in Holman. “Some are on hunger strike, some are doing the work stoppage” to protest involuntary servitude at slave wages, said Glascow. “In the near future, we will start boycotting some of those companies that use prison labor.” U.S. unemployment is “not just about ‘outsourcing’” jobs to foreign countries, he said. “It’s also ‘in-sourcing,’ using prison labor.”
Clinton Election Heightens Danger of World War: If Hillary Clinton wins the White House, she will likely name Samantha Power, the current U.S. ambassador to the UN and an architect of the so-called “humanitarian” military intervention doctrine, as her secretary of state or national security advisor, said Duboisian scholar and veteran social activist Dr. Anthony Monteiro. “It is clear that the Clinton foreign policy would be guided by the Pentagon and her own predisposition to settle accounts in the Middle East and with the Assad government and with Russia, militarily,” said Monteiro. “We on the Left — and, especially, the Black Left – have to begin to raise the question of war and peace as the central question in this election.”
Uhuru Conference: “Africans Need Our Own Theory”: The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (INPDUM) held its national conference in Ferguson, Missouri, this month. “We’ve been borrowing theory from everybody else,” said Movement president Kalambayi Andenet. “What is our interest? We need our own theory, and that’s African internationalism.” INPDUM is part of the African People’s Social Party, chaired by Omali Yeshitela. “We are a revolutionary organization,” he said. “If anybody is going to govern, to rule Black people, it’s got to be Black people, themselves.”
Ethnic Cleansing in Ethiopia: Hundreds of protestors have been killed in recent months in the Amhara and Oromo regions of Ethiopia, victims of the central government’s policy of “ethnic cleansing” of the nation’s two largest population groups, said Tsigereda Mulutega, vice president of the Ethiopian People’s Congress for Struggle (SHENGO). The Ethiopia regime is dominated by people from the Tigrayan ethnic group, which comprises only 6 percent of the population. Ethiopia is the biggest U.S. foreign aid recipient, next to Israel, said Mulutega. Therefore, “it is in the interest of U.S. taxpayers to say ‘no’ to crimes against humanity in Ethiopia.”
Labor:
The Deutsche Bank crisis could take Angela Merkel down — and the Euro And yet it has become increasingly hard to ignore the slow-motion car crash that is Deutsche Bank, or to avoid the conclusion that something very nasty is developing at what was once seen as Europe’s strongest financial institution. Its shares have been in free-fall for a year, touching a new low of 10.7 euros on Monday, down from 27 euros a year ago. Over the weekend, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel waded into the mess, briefing that there could be no government bail-out of the bank. By Matthew Lynn
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
Police have shot and killed at least 2,195 people since Ferguson
Quotes of the Day:
Black Agenda Radio for Week of September 26, 2016
Economy:
The New Banking Crisis — In Two Frightening Graphs By Pam and Russ Martens
World: