Skip to content
Images of the Day:
Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen. — Woody Guthrie
“It’s hard to stress player safety in such a violent game because at the end of the day, ratings sell, people want to buy tickets, people are going to come to games regardless,” Sherman said. “Now, does the league care when Cam Newton gets hit in the face five times and pretty much knocked out of the game [during Week 1]? And they have all these spotters and people that watch the game specifically for these reasons, and you see the guy on his hands and knees shaking his head after he just took a shot to the face. And they’re saying they didn’t see any indications that he needed to come out of the game.” And the 28-year-old, three-time Pro Bowler was just warming up. “If you take the reigning MVP out of a game in the last couple minutes with the game on the line, he’d be frustrated, the fans would be frustrated, but it would be in line with what you said, [what] you want to see in terms of player safety,” Sherman continued. “But you didn’t because it would affect the ratings, because it would affect the game. They’re a bottom-line business. If you can increase their bottom line, then they’ll love you. They’ll do everything they can to put you out more, to market you, to make sure the fans buy your jersey, to put your jersey out because it makes them more money. If you’re not making them money, then at the end of the day, they’re going to find somebody else.” — Watch: Richard Sherman Explains Why NFL Players Shouldn’t Trust the League About Injuries Hard to argue with the Seahawks’ cornerback here.
Videos of the Day:
U.S
The Empire Strikes Back A decade ago left-wing governments, defying Washington and global corporations, took power in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Venezuela, Uruguay, Bolivia and Ecuador. It seemed as if the tide in Latin America was turning. The interference by Washington and exploitation by international corporations might finally be defeated. Latin American governments, headed by charismatic leaders such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, won huge electoral victories. They instituted socialist reforms that benefited the poor and the working class. They refused to be puppets of the United States. They took control of their nations’ own resources and destinies. They mounted the first successful revolt against neoliberalism and corporate domination. It was a revolt many in the United States hoped to emulate here. But the movements and governments in Latin America have fallen prey to the dark forces of U.S. imperialism and the wrath of corporate power. By Chris Hedges
Pentagon caught paying PR firm $540 million to make fake terrorist videos By Zach Cartwright
Ralph Nader: The Jolting Graphic Novel Of Our Times – OpEd If there is one glaring omission among the daily declarations of both empty suit Donald Trump and hawkish Hillary Clinton, it is the strategy for peace. They’ll tell us they want to do more than President Obama is doing to go after ISIS. They’ll tell us they want a more robust military without calling for reducing the huge waste, fraud and redundancy of the military-industrial complex’s budget (a concern that drew a major warning from President Dwight Eisenhower). But how do they plan to wage peace? Waging peace? In the current militarist climate of boomeranging perpetual war, expanding the geographic and devastating reach of adversaries, waging peace may sound vague, soft and squishy.
Former CIA Detainees Describe Previously Unknown Torture Tactic: A Makeshift Electric Chair By Alex Emmons
Environment:
Citing Environmental Risks, Scientists Back Tribes in Dakota Access Fight Meanwhile, a Reuters investigation finds pipeline spill detection system severely flawed by Deirdre Fulton
A new twist in the fight against ExxonMobil’s climate lies The push is on to hold the world’s largest energy company accountable for decades of unchecked pollution and for its lies about greenhouse-gas pollution that have served as its unsteady foundation. The company in question is ExxonMobil, the fossil-fuel conglomerate known for setting world records for quarterly profits, raking in billions of dollars every month. With its secretive ways — including its isolated Texas headquarters that some call “the Death Star” — and its penchant for meddling in the political affairs of Third World nations around the globe, ExxonMobil has always been a dark force in corporate America. By Stuart Smith
Do Not Resist: new film shows how US police have become an occupying army Craig Atkinson’s documentary about police militarization in America asks an important question: how did we get here? By Stuart Miller
45 Years After Attica Uprising, Prisoners Are Rebelling Again Earlier this month, inmates across the country embarked on what organizers have called the largest prison strike in U.S. history, an ambitious mass protest against prison labor and inhumane prison conditions. The strike, which was the culmination of a series of renewed efforts at prison organizing in recent years, kicked off on September 9, in tribute to one of the bleakest moments in the country’s history of incarceration, the uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility, in upstate New York. By Alice Speri
Black Agenda Report for Week of October 3, 2016
Clinton is Far More Anti-Crime Than Pro-Justice: When Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton clashed over stop-and-frisk at their first televised debate, Clinton only weakly addressed “the idea of racial justice,” but instead “went immediately to the idea of effectiveness” of stop-and-frisk as a crime-fighting tool. “If a program infringes on civil liberties and violates the Constitution, it doesn’t matter at all if it’s effective or ineffective,” said Chip Gibbons, policy and legislative counsel for the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. If, however, the purpose of a policy is “to terrorize people of color, then I supposed you can make an argument that stop-and-frisk is effective in doing that,” said Gibbons.
Trump Not the Only Neo-Fascist Runningf or President: Hillary Clinton’s “worldview and her policies are just as dangerous as Donald Trump’s,” said Ajamu Baraka, the Green Party’s vice presidential candidate. Lots of folks “talk about the coming of neo-fascism under Donald Trump, but don’t understand that the foundation for neo-fascism has already been created under the Obama administration — and for some of us, in our communities, we have already been subjected to neo-fascist repression.” In Syria, both Clinton and Trump “are committed to the use of military force to advance the interests of the U.S,” said Baraka.
Candidates “Tone-Deaf” to Inner City Demands: “Our big concern was that the presidential candidates were tone-deaf to the avalanche of organizing and fightback against corporate education interventions that are targeting Black and brown neighborhoods all over the United States,” said Jitu Brown, of the Journey for Justice Alliance, representing 40,000 activists in community organizations in 24 cities. The Alliance demands “real, comprehensive equality in education” and a national moratorium on school charters. “We will not give folks the pass that President Obama got,” said Brown.
Labor:
Germany’s Deutsche Bank, Again in Trouble, Received a U.S. Bailout Twice as Big as Lehman Brothers The gyrations in Deutsche Bank’s shares last week together with a June report from the International Monetary Fund indicating that the bank was “the most important net contributor to systemic risks” has cast a trading pall over all of the global banks. Against that backdrop, most Americans would be stunned to learn that the German Deutsche Bank, which perpetually finds itself on the wrong side of the law, was bailed out in five separate U.S. emergency lending operations during the 2007-2010 financial crisis, receiving more than twice the emergency financial assistance as that received by Lehman Brothers, the failed U.S. investment bank. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
How Capitalism Perpetuates Immigration Capitalism has a long, ugly history of scapegoating immigrants. The pattern has been repeated often. For example, British capitalism’s drive to empire helped force the Irish, as colonial subjects, to emigrate. Miserable colonial conditions, including horrific famines, drove many Irish to labor for capitalists in England at wages lower than English workers had won. English workers raged against and clashed with the Irish immigrants more than they struggled against the colonial system that had brought them. By Richard D. Wolff
The Price of Oil
Quotes of the Day:
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Black Liberation/ Civil Rights:
Economy:
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare: