Daily News Digest Archives
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!
Daily News Digest January 31, 2017
Image of the Day:
The Media Monopoly is ‘Fake News’ 
Quotes of the Day:
The not so ‘Great United States’: The United States was founded on the Genocide of Native Americans, the Slave Trade and Slavery. For the past 80 years, it has been on a perpetual war for perpetual peace. — Roland Sheppard
In 2004, Bagdikian’s revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations — Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) — now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric’s NBC is a close sixth. (See) Historically, Socialists have always considered the mass media to be one of the instruments of capitalist rule. Most liberals etc. have countered this argument by describing the press as being the ‘Fourth Estate,’ the defenders of a free press and democracy, and independent of the capitalist class. — Roland Sheppard, The Media Monopoly
So Donald Trump is going to f**k them all. No excuses for such filthy words today. I’m only quoting the man whose Pentagon offices he just used to disgrace himself — and America. For it was Secretary of Defence James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis who told Iraqis in 2003 that he came “in peace’ – he even urged his Marines to be compassionate – but said of those who might dare to resist America’s illegal invasion of their country: “If you f**k with me, I’ll kill you all.” There’s no getting round it. Call it Nazi, Fascist, racist, vicious, illiberal, immoral, cruel. More dangerously, what Trump has done is a wicked precedent. If you can stop them coming, you can chuck them out. If you can demand “extreme vetting” of Muslims from seven countries, you can also demand a “values test” for those Muslims who have already made it to the USA. Those on visas. Those with residency only. Those — if they are American citizens — with dual citizenship. Or full US citizens of Muslim origin. Or just Americans who are Muslims. Or Hispanics. Or Jews? Refugees one day. Citizens the next. Then refugees again. — Robert Fisk, Donald Trump’s arbitrary, cruel ban on refugees from Muslim countries sets a chilling precedent
Video of the Day:
Trump’s Muslim Ban Already at Work But Excludes Countries Linked To His Businesses
US:
Donald Trumps’s application of the Iron Heel towards Muslims: Donald Trump’s arbitrary, cruel ban on refugees from Muslim countries sets a chilling precedent This self-serving move may only be the beginning from the new President. If he can stop refugees from coming in, who’s to say he won’t also kick them out – or worse? By Robert Fisk
Trump’s Muslim Ban Promotes Terrorism in the ‘Good Old USA’: Hours after Trump signs Muslim ban, Texas mosque goes up in flames By Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani
Donald Trump didn’t come up with the list of Muslim countries he wants to ban. — Obama did! How, though, did the Trump administration choose these seven Muslim-majority countries? The truth is it didn’t: The countries were chosen during Barack Obama‘s presidency. By Sarah Harvard
Trump’s Muslim Ban: Another Symptom of the War on Terror by Michael J. Sainato
Trump Gives Stephen Bannon Access to the National Security Council President Trump signed a memorandum late Saturday afternoon that reorganizes the National Security Council (NSC), including Steve Bannon, the former chair of Breitbart Media and his chief strategist and senior counselor, as well as Reince Priebus, his chief of staff, on its principals committee. The decision is unusual because such positions are not normally given to political operatives. Bannon has been among the most controversial of Trump’s advisors, because of his association with the racist and anti-Semitic “Alt-Right.” By J. Weston Phippen
Forget Nineteen Eighty-Four. These five dystopias better reflect Trump’s US George Orwell’s tale of doublespeak and Big Brother is flying off the shelf after the president’s inauguration. But other imaginary worlds are closer to realitySince the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has shot up the bestseller charts. The book’s chilling account of a couple’s struggle against a dystopian society has many elements that will strike a contemporary reader as disturbingly prescient. Orwell’s description of “doublespeak” – the ability, and requirement, to utterly believe two contradictory thoughts at the same time – feels tailor-made for a president who simultaneously believes that three to five million “illegals” voted in the election, and that his victory in that election was completely fair and valid. Similarly, the Party’s slogan that “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” seems to chime with the White House’s incorrect claim that Trump won the general election with “the most [electoral votes] since any Republican since Reagan” (he didn’t) or that the crowd on 20 January was the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration” (it wasn’t). By Alex Hern 
Obama Killed a 16-Year-Old American in Yemen. Trump Just Killed His 8-Year-Old Sister. In 2010, President Obama directed the CIA to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, despite the fact that he had never been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime, and the agency successfully carried out that order a year later with a September, 2011 drone strike. By Glen Greenwald
Environment:
Sonny Perdue vows to make American agriculture great again – but for whom? President Trump wants Perdue to lead the agriculture department – but the head of a global agribusiness could favor big ag over many family farmers By Ricardo J Salvador and Nora Gilbert
“God Bless Trump”: 25 Years Ago This Man Kick Started the First Fossil Fuel–Funded Campaigns to Attack Climate Science By Graham Readfearn
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Black Liberation/ Civil Rights:
Black Agenda Radio for Week of January 30, 2017
Obamacare is Doomed: It’s Time for Single Payer: Instead of attempting to salvage the doomed and fatally flawed Affordable Healthcare Act, progressives should seize the time and push for single payer health care, said pediatrician and political activist Dr. Margaret Flowers. “Eighty percent of Democratic voters want a single payer health care system, and now polls are showing that even Republicans, particularly those with lower incomes, are moving into majority support for National Improved Medicare for All.” The push, however, must come from the people, not the Democrats. “Even Sen. Sanders has backed down and is saying, Let’s protect the Affordable Care Act now and we’ll fight for single payer later,” said Flowers. The HOPE campaign — “Health Over Profit for Everyone” — begins February 1.
On Reparations, It’s Not a Question of “If,” but “How”: There’s been a substantive change in H.R. 40, the Reparations legislation Rep. John Conyers has introduced every year since 1989. Originally, the bill called for a study of whether Black Americans had been injured by slavery and Jim Crow. But now, according to Kamm Howard, chairman of the legislative committee of N’COBRA, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, the bill “begins with the focus that reparations are due, and how does this government engage in reparative initiatives.” He said the 2001 United Nations World Conference on Racism, in Durban, South Africa, made clear the enslaving nations’ “obligation to make repairs” to descendants of the victims. Howard helped Rep. Conyers’ staff reframe the legislation.
Will Democrats Help Trump Renegotiate NAFTA?: “If President Trump wants to enact a renegotiated NAFTA, he’s going to have to work with the Democrats to figure out how to build a majority” on Capitol Hill, “which will be comprised of most of the Democrats and a handful of Republicans,” said Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch for Public Citizen. President Bill Clinton pushed the NAFTA corporate trade deal through Congress against the wishes of majorities of Democrats. “The reality is, you will never get a majority of the Republicans in Congress to change the old NAFTA,” said Wallach. NAFTA might not end in a renegotiation. “If President Trump continues to be so disrespectful to other world leaders,” Mexico or the U.S. might simply withdraw from NAFTA.
Courtrooms as Political Forums: Veteran Black activist Efia Nwangaza had been looking forward to a jury trial on charges of blocking a Greenville, South Carolina, intersection two years ago to protest a Missouri grand jury’s failure to indict the cop that killed Michael Brown, in Ferguson. However, Greenville authorities dropped the charges the day before her trial, depriving Nwangaza of the opportunity to put on a political defense. “The purpose of the demonstration was to call attention to police impunity and their slaughtering of us from one end of the country to the other,” said Nwangaza, director of the Malcolm X Center for Self-Determination and a leader of the state’s Stop Mass Incarceration Network. With the courtroom venue no longer available, Nwangaza and her defense team will now bring the issues before a people’s tribunal and “strengthen the cause that has been advanced by the Uhuru Movement for Black community control of the police.”
Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.
Labor:
Economy:
Gross National Product
The Chaos President At 8:05 a.m. this morning in New York, futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average were showing a potential loss of 55 points when the market opens at 9:30 a.m. At least some of the market jitters can be traced to the weekend of chaos at U.S. airports where legal residents of the U.S. found themselves in a twilight zone, unable to get back into the country as a result of President Donald Trump’s hastily penned Executive Order. As media word spread of university faculty, Ph.D. candidates, medical students and business executives being denied reentry into the U.S. after visits abroad, spontaneous protests erupted at major international airports across the U.S. including San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Dulles outside of Washington, D.C. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution, Chapter 43, The Art of Insurrection
People do not make revolution eagerly any more than they do war. There is this difference, however, that in war compulsion plays the decisive rôle, in revolution there is no compulsion except that of circumstances. A revolution takes place only when there is no other way out. And the insurrection, which rises above a revolution like a peak in the mountain chain of its events, can no more be evoked at will than the revolution as a whole. The masses advance and retreat several times before they make up their minds to the final assault.
Conspiracy is ordinarily contrasted to insurrection as the deliberate undertaking of a minority to a spontaneous movement of the majority. And it is true that a victorious insurrection, which can only be the act of a class called to stand at the head of the nation, is widely separated both in method and historic significance from a governmental overturn accomplished by conspirators acting in concealment from the masses.
In every class society there are enough contradictions so that a conspiracy can take root in its cracks. Historic experience proves, however, that a certain degree of social disease is necessary – as in Spain, for instance, or Portugal, or South America – to supply continual nourishment for a régime of conspiracies. A pure conspiracy even when victorious can only replace one clique of the same ruling class by another – or still less, merely alter the governmental personages. Only mass insurrection has ever brought the victory of one social régime over another. Periodical conspiracies are commonly an expression of social stagnation and decay, but popular insurrections on the contrary come usually as a result of some swift growth which has broken down the old equilibrium of the nation. The chronic “revolutions” of the South American republics have nothing in common with the Permanent Revolution; they are in a sense the very opposite thing.
This does not mean, however, that popular insurrection and conspiracy are in all circumstances mutually exclusive. An element of conspiracy almost always enters to some degree into any insurrection. Being historically conditioned by a certain stage in the growth of a revolution, a mass insurrection is never purely spontaneous. Even when it flashes out unexpectedly to a majority of its own participants, it has been fertilised by those ideas in which the insurrectionaries see a way out of the difficulties of existence. But a mass insurrection can be foreseen and prepared. It can be organised in advance. In this case the conspiracy is subordinate to the insurrection, serves it, smoothes its path, hastens its victory. The higher the political level of a revolutionary movement and the more serious its leadership, the greater will be the place occupied by conspiracy in a popular insurrection.
It is very necessary to understand the relations between insurrection and conspiracy, both as they oppose and as they supplement each other. It is especially so, because the very use of the word conspiracy, even in Marxian literature, contains a superficial contradiction due to the fact that it sometimes implies an independent undertaking initiated by the minority, at others a preparation by the minority of a majority insurrection. Read More