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 8, 2017
Images of the Day:
Constitutional Government. Sad! Trump responds to the “so-called judge” who stalled his Muslim ban. By Khalil Bendib
Quotes of the Day:
In 1967, King clearly wrote his outlook for the struggle to gain economic equality: On Page 602, A Testament of Hope: the essential writings and speeches of Martin Luther: Martin Luther King stated the course that he was planning to take in the fight for economic equality: . . . The Emergence of social initiatives by a revitalized labor movement would be taking place as Negros are placing economic issues on the highest agenda. The coalition of an energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed, and welfare recipients may be the source of power that reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform.. . . He continues on Page 631: There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum — and livable — income for every American family. There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peaces will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a true brotherhood. . . . — The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement
The age of cognitive dissonance. Sunday, the American public (millions of them) watched the NFL Super Bowl. This spectacle is, of course, rife with all manner of jingoism and military symbolism (as is the game itself). But this is also a game, American football, that has proved to destroy the human brain of those who play it. In fact there was even a Hollywood movie, a popular one, about the doctor who led the discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE); the brain trauma caused by the collision of man and helmet. Great players such as Mike Webster and Junior Seau died by their own hand; Terry Long drank anti freeze as his brain went into full melt down. Here is a list of NFL players with CTE. — The Violence of Silence
Videos of the Day:
‘We Will Step Up For Our Kids’: Education Advocates Vow to Resist Betsy DeVos
Greece’s Creditors Demand New Austerity Measures As Condition for Next Bailout
9 /11 Trillions: Follow The Money
US:
DAPL Opponents Vow ‘Fierce Resistance’ as Army Corps Grants Last Easement Unless there is an injunction, construction could begin in 24 hours by Nadia Prupis
Will Facebook’s Fake-News Detection System Lead to Censorship? There’s a difference between muckraking and fake news. Determining the difference is too difficult for a computer, even one with the smartest kind of artificial intelligence. By Bill Boyarsky
Environment:
Did You Know Hunters Point Nava; Shipyard Still Has Radioactive “Hot Spots” Since WWII?
Fake soil tests delay SF Shipyard project Concern over the accuracy of the soil tests first emerged in October 2012, when the Navy discovered that some results were inconsistent with results from previous samples collected in the same areas. While the dirt in question was identified as having been collected from beneath a former lab used to conduct radiation tests on animals, an internal investigation by the contractor doing the cleanup, Tetra Tech, found that in at least 386 cases it had been pulled from areas already given a clean bill for radiological contamination.
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Black Liberation/ Civil Rights
Devin McCourty and Martellus Bennet Just Issued a Challenge to Every Black Member of the New Patriots: Stating that they will not be in attendance when the Patriots visit the White House
The Ford Report: Life Sentences Are Slow Death Behind the Walls In the US, a life sentence amounts to a slow death sentence behind prison walls. The Trump administration, not give to the token gestures of his predecessors, is not expected to change this. by the Real News Network (Video)
Freedom Rider: “Resist Trump, Resist the Democrats” Any “resistance” to Trump that allies itself with Democrats, is futile. The Democrats are “unprincipled scoundrels” who “have no desire to move away from their corporate sugar daddies.” If the same people that now declare themselves foes of Trumpism “spend time wondering if they should back Cory ‘the hooker’ Booker or Elizabeth Warren in 2020, or ponder who should run the Democratic National Committee, they aren’t resisting anything.” by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Apples Don’t Fall Far from Trees: The Nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court If you think President Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, is a raving right-winger, check out his mother. Ann Gorsuch’s administration of the Reagan era EPA was “marked by sharp budget cuts, in-fighting with career civil servants, a cozy relationship with corporate polluters, and lack of environmental enforcement,” paving the way for future crises, including the lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan. by EPA Editor and Columnist, Dr. Marsha Adebayo 
The Undressed Empire: An Analysis of the First Weeks of the Trump Era Contradictions abound in the mass protests against Donald Trump’s whirlwind of proclamations. While Trump’s executive order banning many Muslims should be categorically rejected, we must also reject “the Democratic and Republican parties for creating the conditions that led to it.” Trump has stripped the socially acceptable garments from U.S. empire. But, “a naked empire remains a dangerous empire” — and only masses of people can defeat it. by Danny Haiphong
Garza, of Movement4BlackLives: Our Cynicism Will Not Build a Movement. Collaboration Will Before she decided to take part in the Women’s March on the nation’s capital, the author was “conflicted” about the project. Like others, she wondered “where were all of these white people while our people are being killed in the streets, jobless, homeless, over incarcerated, under educated?” Garza concluded that, “If our movement is not serious about building power, then we are just engaged in a futile exercise of who can be the most radical.” by Alicia Garza
It’s Time for a Politics of Resistance and Solidarity The Trump phenomenon points to a civilizational shift; namely, the slow, painful demise of the Western Empire. If this shift breaks down the European Union, dismantles NATO, weakens the Empire’s financial control over the global South, and opens a space for a new moral and political order to emerge, then it is an opportunity all revolutionary forces must seize. by Yash Tandon
Canada Out of NATO! Québec City Murders of Muslims Rooted in War on Terror Canadians demonstrated in Ontario, to expressed both their revulsion to the private terror of the man that murdered six Muslims in Quebec City and their opposition to Canada’s complicity in U.S. state terror against the Muslim world. These U.S.-led wars are designed to steal targeted nations’ “energy resources and to further encircle those countries that the U.S. deems its competitors on the global chessboard, including Russia, China, and Iran.” by Ann Garrison
Obama & Trump/Democrats & Republicans: Exposing the Similarities to Break Dependence on the Corporate Political Parties “Many who voted for Hillary Clinton, and who are now protesting, would have never protested her actual imperialist legacy, had she been elected.” The same goes for Obama supporters. Democrats and Republicans are joined in their subservience to corporate masters, and to imperialist wars. “It is imperative that the connections between Democrats and Republicans be made, especially regarding foreign policy. by Solomon Comissiong
Black History Month: Martin Luther King — Further Challenges:
. . . Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States’ role in the Vietnam War. On April 4, 1967 — exactly one year before his death — King spoke out strongly against the US’s role in the war, insisting that the US was in Vietnam “to occupy it as an American colony” and calling the US government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” But he also argued that the country needed larger and broader moral changes:
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.”
King was long hated by many white southern segregationists, but this speech turned the more mainstream media against him. TIME called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi”, and The Washington Post declared that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”
With regards to Vietnam, King often claimed that North Vietnam “did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had arrived in the tens of thousands.” (Quoted in Michael Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War, 1999 p. 182) King also praised North Vietnam’s land reform. (Quoted in Lind, 1999) He accused the United States of having killed a million Vietnamese “mostly children.” (Guenter Lewey, America in Vietnam, 1978 pp. 444-5) He once even equated U.S. involvement in Vietnam to Nazi Germany’s use of concentration camps. (Quoted in Lind, 1999)]]
The speech was a reflection of King’s evolving political advocacy in his later years, sparked in part by his affiliation with and training at the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center. King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation. Toward the end of his life, King more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. Though his public language was guarded, so as to avoid being linked to communism by his political enemies, in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism:
You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry…. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong… with capitalism…. There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. (Frogmore, S.C. November 14, 1966. Speech in front of his staff.)
King also stated in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech that “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them.
In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the “Poor People’s Campaign” to address issues of economic justice. However, according to the article “Coalition Building and Mobilization Against Poverty”, King and SCLC’s Poor People’s Campaign was not supported by the other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, including Bayard Rustin. Their opposition incorporated arguments that the goals of Poor People Campaign was too broad, the demands unrealizable, and thought these campaigns would accelerate the backlash and repression on the poor and the black.
The campaign culminated in a march on Washington, D.C. demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the United States. He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington — engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be — until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.”
King’s economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America’s cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its “hostility to the poor” — appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.” His vision was for change that was more revolutionary than mere reform: he cited systematic flaws of racism, poverty, militarism and materialism, and that “reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.” Garrow, op.cit. p. 214. . . .
Labor:
Economy:
World:
The Return of the Irish Border by Aidan O’Brien
Investigative Journalist Poisoned to Death While Covering Corrupt Oil Companies By Claire Bernish
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare: