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 16, 2017
Image of the Day:
How In the Hell? — War and War Profits Come Before People! 
Quote of the Day:
. . . The community must reinforce its moral responsibility to rid itself of the effects of years of exploitation, neglect, and apathy, and wage an unrelenting struggle against police brutality.” Yes. There are some good policemen and some bad policemen. Usually we get the bad ones. With all the police in Harlem, there is too much crime, too much drug addiction, too much alcoholism, too much prostitution, too much gambling. So it makes us suspicious about the motives of Commissioner Murphy when he sends all these policemen up here. We begin to think that they are just his errand boys, whose job it is to pick up the graft and take it back downtown to Murphy. Anytime there’s a police commissioner who finds it necessary to increase the strength numerically of the policemen in Harlem and, at the same time, we don’t see any sign of a decrease in crime, why, I think we’re justified in suspecting his motives. He can’t be sending them up here to fight crime, because crime is on the increase. The more cops we have, the more crime we have. We begin to think that they bring some of the crime with them. So our purpose is to organize the community so that we ourselves since the police can’t eliminate the drug traffic, we have to eliminate it. Since the police can’t eliminate organized gambling, we have to eliminate it. Since the police can’t eliminate organized prostitution and all of these evils that are destroying the moral fiber of our community, it is up to you and me to eliminate these evils ourselves. But in many instances, when you unite in this country or in this city to fight organized crime, you’ll find yourselves fighting the police department itself because they are involved in the organized crime. Wherever you have organized crime, that type of crime cannot exist other than with the consent of the police, the knowledge of the police and the cooperation of the police. . . . — Malcolm X, Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (1964)
Videos of the Day:
The original 9/11 in 1898 “Remember the Maine” — A fraud that led to war
Vaughn Correctional Center Inmates Rose Up Against Decades of Oppression
Rattling the Bars: The Unconstitutional Practice of Life Without Parole
U.S.:
With ‘Valentine to Corruption,’ Trump Officially Kills Big Oil Transparency Cardin-Luger amendment was established to prevent multinational energy companies from striking backroom deals with corrupt governments by Lauren McCauley 
Environment:
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Chemical Plant Boom Spurred by Fracking Will Bring Smog, Plastic Glut, and Risks to Workers’ Health, New Report Warns By Sharon Kelly 
Clash Over the Bayou Bridge Pipeline Ratchets up After Louisiana Pipeline Explosion By Julie Dermansky
Energy News:
Nuke Experts: Fukushima plant must be entombed like Chernobyl — Reactors will remain a threat to world “for the rest of time” — “Humanly impossible” to clean up due to shockingly high radiation levels
Black Liberation/ Civil Rights:
Freedom Rider: Human Rights Industry Protects Imperialism When so-called Human Rights organizations are financed by the one percent they dependably echo the priorities and prejudices of their influential sponsors. So it is that Amnesty International is an energetic source of war propaganda on behalf of US imperial efforts in the Middle East and elsewhere. Their “report” of a supposed “human slaughterhouse” operated by the Syrian regime is the latest installment in a campaign to justify US intervention in the Middle East. by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Continued Desecration of Bethesda African Cemetery: The Community Fights Back! In the parts of the US which were once slave country, from New England to Florida to Texas, the burial grounds of African slaves are being uncovered, often by commerical developers intent on building yet another badly needed strip mall. In Bethesday MD, a suburb of the nation’s capital, our columnist Dr. Abadeyo recounts the struggle of that community to protect the resting places of their, and our ancestors. By BAR Editor and Columnist, Dr. Marsha Adebayo
Trump’s Foreign Policy: Continuity or Break? Some things do change depending on who and which of the two US ruling parties are in power. US imperialism isn’t one of them. The “foreign policies” of both parties are the maintenance and extension of global US hegemony through military, economic, cultural and diplomatic means. Trump and his team may pretend to or actually hate some of the players, but they are down for the game, which builds on the foundations of previous administrations. by Danny Haiphong 
Revolution Beyond Blue Bubbles BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors Iowa City speech, according to Paul Street, fell short of any class analysis of the Trump victory, how to fight facism, or the road ahead. While the Movement For Black Lives declined to endorse presidential candidates, its vision still does not reach beyond the confines of the two ruling parties. And socialism, despite Bernie Sanders, is a word the BLM leaders never mention. by Paul Street
Welcome (To the United Front Aganist Facism) Come as you are, and be ready to build the world we all deserve, invites our poet, to the united front against facism. Wherever you come from, wherever you were this morning or last week, your hand your mind your heart and energies are welcomed in this collaborative effort… by BAR poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner 
Alternative Facts on 7 Countries’ Terrorists This and every year since the dawn of this country, most terrorist acts in the US have been perpetrated by white Christian males. So how, our poet asks, do we make sense of Trump’s attempted travel ban and its effect on terrorism inside the US? Do they really fear that white boys will be trained in Somaila, Yemen, Iraq or Iran? by BAR poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner 
Gambia; A Very African Coup Just another week in neocolonial Africa, where every country’s military is armed, clothed, equipped and trained by the US through AFRICOM. Reports in the western press of a corrupt president refusing to leave office and being ousted to universal acclaim by the joint intervention of the Nigerian Air Force and Senagalese ground troops obfuscate or omit most of the story. by Thomas C. Mountain
Ida B. Wells-Barnett : Iola, Princess of the Press & Feminist Crusader for Equality and Justice Ida B. Wells was the kind of black leader we don’t see much of any more. Unlike today’s leaders, the heads of nonprofit organizations financed by the self-interested generosity of the one percent, Ida’s career was financed by the readers of the black press, from ordinary African American people. This gave Wells the unique ability to tell the truth without fear or favor, which is no more than the duty of every journalist. Ida, or Iola as she called herself in some early dispatches from lynching country has been gone from us longer than she was here by now, but her spirit is still felt, wherever some of us are brave. By Kiilu Nyasha
Black History Month:
The Ethnic Cleansing of New Orleans 2008 A Requiem By Roland Sheppard
04/21/2008/ When I first wrote All They Will Call You Will Be ‘Refugees’, for the San Francisco BayView, right after the catastrophe of Katrina on September 2, 2005, I stated that:
What is needed is a massive public works project, to rebuild this city — the birthplace of Jazz — to employ the people who have been disposed by Katrina and to rebuild this city from the ashes of the old!
I quoted the Glen Ford Black Commentator’s radio station’s audio commentary on September 2 2005, Will the ‘New’ New Orleans be Black?, he expressed the problems and the process quite well:
One of the premiere Black cities in the nation faces catastrophe. There is no doubt in my mind that New Orleans will one day rise again from its below sea level foundations. The question is, will the new New Orleans remain the two-thirds Black city it was before the levees crumbled? Some would say it is unseemly to speak of politics and race in the presence of a massive calamity that has destroyed the lives and prospects of so many people from all backgrounds. But I beg to differ. As we have witnessed, over and over again, the rich and powerful are very quick to reward themselves as soon as disaster presents the opportunity. Remember that within days of 9/11, the Bush regime executed a multibillion dollar bailout for the airline industry. By the time you hear this commentary, they may have already used the New Orleans disaster to bail out the insurance industry – one of the richest businesses on the planet. But what of the people of New Orleans, 67 percent of whom are Black? New Orleans is a poor city. Twenty-eight percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Well over half are renters, and the median value of homes occupied by owners is only $87,000. From the early days of the flood, it was clear that much of the city’s housing stock would be irredeemably damaged. The insurance industry may get a windfall of federal relief, but the minority of New Orleans home owners will get very little – even if they are insured. The renting majority may get nothing. If the catastrophe in New Orleans reaches the apocalyptic dimensions towards which it appears to be headed, there will be massive displacement of the Black and poor. Poor people cannot afford to hang around on the fringes of a city until the powers-that-be come up with a plan to accommodate them back to the jurisdiction. And we all know that the prevailing model for urban development is to get rid of poor people. The disaster provides an opportunity to deploy this model in New Orleans on a citywide scale, under the guise of rebuilding the city and its infrastructure. In place of the jobs that have been washed away, there could be alternative employment through a huge, federally funded rebuilding effort. But this is George Bush’s federal government. Does anyone believe that the Bush men would mandate that priority employment go to the pre-flood, mostly Black population of the city. And the Black mayor of New Orleans is a Democrat in name only, a rich businessman, no friend of the poor. What we may see in the coming months is a massive displacement of Black New Orleans, to the four corners of the nation. The question that we must pose, repeatedly and in the strongest terms, is: Through whose vision, and in whose interest, will New Orleans rise again. For Radio BC, I’m Glen Ford.
Since that time, I have viewed the Spike Lee 2006 DVD, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Greg Palast’s 2006 DVD Video, Big Easy to Big Empty—The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans, and Bill Quigley’s essay The Cleansing of New Orleans. I have come to the conclusion that the Ethnic Cleansing was a plan that was already in place, just waiting for a hurricane for its implementation. Or as Congressman Richard Baker, R-La., was overheard telling lobbyists, right after Katrina, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” From his point of view, Katrina made it possible for the politicians to gentrify New Orleans and carry out the the Ethnic Cleansing of the city.
They knew from past floods in 1927 and Hurricane Betsy in 1956, that when the levees break, working class and Black Communities get flooded. They knew that the levees were not constructed properly, yet the government of this country has refused to rectify this problem for the for 40 years! Palast investigates the politically connected company that was paid $500,000 by the US government to develop a hurricane evacuation plan — Innovated Emergency Management Inc. (IEM). IEM never came up with a plan. It had nobody with the background to develop a plan. Read More