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 February 7, 2017
Images of the Day:
The New Slave Auction Block
Quotes of the Day:
While discussing the current situation recently, a historian friend told me that he did not believe history repeated itself. Bearing that in mind, I asked him if he thought it still had lessons for us to draw on. He answered, yes of course. Keeping that under consideration, I decided to take a deeper look at the rapid changes Donald Trump and his “people” are trying to put in place in the United States. As I began my investigation, it was announced that Trump adviser Steven Bannon had replaced a General and an intelligence chief on the National Security Council. In essence, this move is another attempt by the Trump administration to upend the traditional chain of command (the professional class, if you will), with ideologues from outside that class. Upon hearing of this move, I was immediately reminded of similar moves by Adolf Hitler at the beginning of his government. Now known as the Gleichschaltung, this time period in the rise of Nazism involved (among other things) the replacing of various members of the German government with Nazi ideologues whose primary allegiance was to Hitler and the philosophy of Nazism. Essentially the process of bringing all elements of power, from the government to the military to the trade unions to the media, into line with the Nazi state, the Gleichschaltung began with the elimination of independent state legislatures. This was followed by the dismantling of trade unions, attacks on the independence of the churches (especially those opposed to the Nazis), the elimination of all political parties except for the Nazi party, the creation of youth, worker and women’s organizations where involvement was mandatory and enforced by the schools and community. In addition, the private militias of the Nazis became official state military organizations with the task of enforcing allegiance to the Hitler wing of the Nazi party. Crucial to all of this undertaking was the role of Hitler’s right hand man and propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels. In the wake of the Trump administration’s unconstitutional immigration order, the spontaneous protests and numerous lawsuits that took place in its wake, and the refusal of certain Justice Department officials to support or enforce the ban, and their subsequent dismissal, Trump dug in his heels. For many folks, the firing of the Justice Department officials was reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s firing of officials charged with investigating his participation in the Watergate break-in and cover up (one result of which was the elevation of Robert Bork.) This became known as the Saturday Night Massacre and was but one of Nixon’s authoritarian attempts to assume complete power of the US government. — Ron Jacobs, Trumpism’s Gleichschaltung?
“Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an anti-war rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances,” Illinois State Senator Barack Obama said in 2002. Later in the same speech: “What I am opposed to is a dumb war.” Although elected president at least in part on his image as “the peace candidate,” Obama owned eight years of constant war. He waffled on then partially reversed the withdrawal from Iraq negotiated by his predecessor. He stretched the eight-year Afghanistan war to 16 years and counting. He began or expanded operations in Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, escalating even to extra-judicial assassinations of American citizens. — Trump’s Foreign Policy: Obama’s Third Term, Bush’s Fifth
Videos of the Day:
Baltimore Whistleblower Teacher Says ‘All Systems Down’ in City Schools Longtime educator gives an inside view of deplorable conditions and poor learning environment as city officials prepare to layoff nearly 1000 employees to address budget deficit crisis.
Trump Attacks Climate Science to Defend Interests of U.S. Capital The revolt of Canadian scientists against former prime minister Stephen Harper can serve as a model for U.S. scientists facing Trump’s attacks on climate research, says professor Chris Williams
US:
Bureau of Indian Affairs sending agents to help clear Dakota Access protesters from site By Juliet Eilperin
Donald Trump launches attack on judge who stopped ‘Muslim travel ban’: ‘If something happens blame him’ The President criticised the US judicial system – the third branch of government that acts as a check for the Executive Branch – for the second day in a row via his preferred method of communication: Twitter By Feliks Garcia 
Environment:
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Fukushima: Japan Declares State Of Emergency, Reactor Leaks Into Ocean Record high amount of radiation recorded by scientists
Fukushima nuclear reactor radiation at highest level since 2011 meltdown Extraordinary readings pile pressure on operator Tepco in its efforts to decommission nuclear power station By Justin McCurry
We’re Eating Fukushima Radiation; Bloody Cancerous Tumors in Fish & Seafood By David Wolf 
Energy News: TV Reporter: “Woah! Dead whales!” Record high number of deaths in Hawaii — “Carcasses scattered throughout islands” in Pacific — Sick and starving animals a ‘mystery’ to experts — “Possible health effects” from Fukushima radiation off coast (VIDEO)
California Regulators Allow Oil Companies to Continue Injecting Wastewater Into More Than 1,600 Wells in Protected Aquifers Regulators with the California Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) announced in January that they plan to halt oil and gas wastewater injection in 475 oil wells in the Golden State — but also that they will continue to allow injections into federally protected aquifers at another 1,650 wells. By Mike Gaworecki
Black Liberation/ Civil Rights Black History Month:
Reparations and Capitalism
The World Conference on Racism held in Durban, South Africa, several years ago, not only raised the issue of Israel as an apartheid state, but also raised the issue of reparations for the colonialized world due to centuries of rape and plunder of the world’s masses by capitalism. Most of the arguments on this subject were first written by Karl Marx, over 130 years ago in “Capital”, Volume One, Part VIII, Chapter 31, (the) “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist”. This often-overlooked chapter is very important in today’s world.
Industrial Capitalism did not come into being due to the gradual primitive accumulation of capital, but rather the industrial revolution was fueled by the wealth plundered from the colonialized world in the name of Christianity. This is the historic material basis for modern racism as an ideology, which is used to justify the holocaust perpetuated upon the majority of the world during the period of the subjugation of the colonial world to European/United States capitalist imperialism.
Karl Marx was one of the first to oppose the colonial oppression of the world’s masses. He did not mince his words in, this chapter of Capital, he wrote:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. … If money … comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.
Recently a new factor has been added to the equation — “The Drug Trade”. In his article, War on Drugs Dirty Money Foundation of US Growth and Empire Size and Scope of Money Laundering by US Banks, , by James Petras, Professor of Sociology, Binghamton University, explains that 500 Billion to a Trillion dollars gets added to world capitalist economy through “illegal means.” he concludes the article with the following:
The increasing polarization of the world is embedded in this organized system of criminal and corrupt financial transactions. While speculation and foreign debt payments play a role in undermining living standards in the crisis regions, the multi-trillion dollar money laundering and bank servicing of corrupt officials is a much more significant factor, sustaining Western prosperity, U.S. empire building and financial stability. The scale, scope and time frame of transfers and money laundering, the centrality of the biggest banking enterprises and the complicity of the governments, strongly suggests that the dynamics of growth and stagnation, empire and re-colonization are intimately related to a new form of capitalism built around pillage, criminality, corruption and complicity. ‘This Goes Straight to the Top.’
An article written in Counterpunch titled, Race and the Drug War, during the last election campaign, points out another factor of the “Drug War:”
. . . Domestically, the ‘drug war’ has always been a pretext for social control, going back to the racist application of drug laws against Chinese laborers in the recession of the 1870s when these workers we reviewed as competition for the dwindling number of jobs available. The main users, middle-class white men and women taking opium in liquid form as ‘tonics’, weren’t harassed. By 1887 the Chinese Exclusion Act allowed Chinese opium addicts to be arrested and deported. In the 1930s the racist head of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Harry Anslinger, was renaming hemp as ‘marijuana’ to associate it with Mexican laborers and claiming that marijuana ‘can arouse in blacks and Hispanics a state of menacing fury or homicidal attack.’ By the 1950s Anslinger had pushed through the first mandatory drug sentences. As so often, Nixon was helpfully explicit in his private remarks. H.R.Haldeman recorded in his diary a briefing by the president in 1969,prior to launching of the war on drugs: ‘[Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.’ So what was ‘the system’ duly devised? On June 19, 1986, Maryland University basketball star Len Bias died from an overdose of cocaine. As Dan Baum put it in his excellent Smoke and Mirrors, The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, ‘In life, Len Bias was a terrific basketball player. In death he became the Archduke Ferdinand of the Total War on Drugs.’ It was falsely reported that Bias had smoked crack cocaine the night before his death. In fact he had used powder cocaine and there was no link between this use and the failure of his heart, according to the coroner. Bias had signed with the Boston Celtics and amid Boston’s rage and grief Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a Boston rep, rushed into action. In early July he convened a meeting of the Democratic Party leadership: ‘Write me some goddamn legislation,’ he ordered. ‘All anybody in Boston is talking about is Len Bias. They want blood. If we move fast enough we can get out in front of the White House.’ In fact the White House was moving pretty fast. Among other things the DEA had been instructed to allow ABC News to accompany it on raids against crackhouses. ‘Crack is the hottest combat-reporting story to come along since the end of the Vietnam war,” the head of the New York office of the DEA exulted. All this fed into congressional frenzy to write tougher laws. House Majority Leader Jim Wright called drug abuse ‘a menace draining away our economy of some $230 billion this year, slowly rotting away the fabric of our society and seducing and killing our young.’ Not to be outdone, South Carolina Republican Thomas Arnett proclaimed that ‘drugs are a threat worse than nuclear warfare or any chemical warfare waged on any battlefield.’ The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act was duly passed. It contained 29 new minimum mandatory sentences. Up until that time in the history of the Republic there had been only 56 mandatory minimum sentences. The new law had a death penalty provision for drug ‘king pins’ and prohibited parole for even minor possession offenses. But the chief focus of the bill was crack cocaine (mainly used in the inter-cities). Congress established a 100-to-1 sentencing ratio between possession of crack and powder cocaine (mainly used in the suburbs). Under this provision possession of five grams of crack carries a minimum five-year federal prison sentence. The same mandatory minimum is not reached for any amount of powder cocaine under 500 grams. This sentencing disproportion was based on faulty testimony that crack was 50 times as addictive as powdered coke. Congress then doubled this ratio as a so-called ‘violence penalty’.
For the world’s masses, from Capitalism’s beginning there has been nothing progressive about capitalism. From its bloody beginning capitalism has been a holocaust for humanity bringing war, drug aditiction, famine, pestilence and death throughout the world.
In today’s world—the aids epidemic; the many wars and bombings; the overproduction of food and simultaneous starvation of the world’s poor; and the destruction of the earth as a habitat for humanity—capitalism continues to demonstrate its inhuman bloody nature against humanity.
Based upon what Karl Marx explains in this chapter and the Petras addition to it, the amount due to be repaid based upon profits made from this plunder would be more than the total gross national product (GNP) of all of the imperialist states. In reality, the costs for reparations by capitalism for its crimes against humanity, is so astronomical it is beyond human understanding.
Instead of being proven wrong, Marx is continuously being proven correct in his analysis of capitalism. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The very future of humanity is now at stake.
Labor:
Economy:
