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 22, 2017
Image of the Day:
Boss Tweed Rules!
Quotes of the Day:
Illinois schools at every level are suffering severe cutbacks. Chicago’s property tax recently went up by another half-billion dollars. Young adults in poor neighborhoods have no jobs. But Illinois lost over a billion dollars in 2015 tax revenue to just five companies (Boeing, Archer Daniels, United Airlines, Exelon, Abbott Labs), which according to their own records paid less than 1% of their profits in state taxes, about a tenth of the required amount. These are the companies benefiting from our state’s people and location and infrastructure and technology. Yet they’re paying almost nothing to support our children and our society. — You Deserve Facts
. . . This election cycle however was faced with a dramatic new shift in sentiment. In the main, the “middle-class” concluded that the steady deterioration in their prospects was not temporary but permanent. Not the function of some recurring business cycle, which would eventually be reversed, but rather something much more sweeping and fundamental. And increasingly they correctly concluded that the existing political parties and the entire body of politicians that make them up, not only had no solutions, but no desire or self-interest in challenging this. They also knew of course that not everybody was hurting. Under the joint leadership and policies of both these capitalist parties the “one percent” has been doing fabulously well, even outstripping in concentrated wealth the fabled “one percent” of the notorious “Gilded Age.” This then was the reality in which the nation’s two party system approached the 2016 presidential elections. Despite all this, in smug and blind confidence, these two parties then marched ahead with their original plans to present the U.S. electorate with the “democratic” privilege of choosing between another Bush and another Clinton as the nation’s 45th president. Their arrogance stunned much of the American electorate and opened the door for the improbable candidacies of two “outsiders” with no real support in the official two-party system. One was the billionaire reality TV host Donald Trump, the other a self-proclaimed “socialist” Bernie Sanders. Their candidacies were universally written off with derision and ridicule by all the political experts and commentators. Donald Trump became the official candidate of the Republican Party and Bernie Sanders came within a hair’s breadth of being the Democratic Party candidate despite an organized conspiracy by virtually the entire Democratic National Committee to secretly smear and sabotage his candidacy in favor of their anointed, Hillary Clinton. The seemingly bizarre unfolding of the 2016 presidential election is not the product of some unfathomable accident or fluke. On one hand, much of the U.S. middle-class/working class, for the first time, lost all confidence in the ability of either wing of America’s two-party monopoly to address and reverse their long decline. In their desperate search for some alternative we had the completely unforeseen emergence of the Trump and Sanders candidacies. But even more fundamentally the election represents the confused, disruptive reaction of America’s ruling elite to the painful ending of an almost century-long era of U.S. global domination. The present two party system and its political actors have been thrown into complete disarray by this new reality. Whatever name they may have used in the past to describe it — “American Exceptionalism” — “Leader of the Free World” — they certainly never contemplated its demise. Despite their growing confusion and deepening internal dissent the U.S. ruling elite are determined that the costs of this new reality will be borne not by them but by America’s increasingly hard pressed middle-class/working class. — Lynn Henderson, A watershed election for U.S. imperialism
Videos of the Day:
Baltimore Students Push for Statewide Styrofoam Ban Following similar initiatives in cities across the country, city students are organizing to prohibit the use of this synthetic material in schools and business across Maryland
Remember the war on drugs? — The drug companies won
U.S.:
Japanese American Internment Remembered, as Trump Rounds Up Immigrants by Shepherd Bliss
Fed Up with ‘Dysfunction and Deadlock,’ Former FEC Chair Will Resign ‘What we are left with is an agency mandated to ensure transparency and disclosure that is actually working to keep the public in the dark,’ writes Ann M. Ravel by Deirdre Fulton
A watershed election for U.S. imperialism By Lynn Henderson
Environment:
The Laissez-faire Capitalist Bells Toll in Flint Michigan — They Toll for Humanity’s Future:
They The people of Flint did not enjoy the equal protection of environmental or public health laws, nor did they have a meaningful voice in the decisions leading up to the… crisis — Michigan Civil Rights Commission, Michigan civil rights panel: Flint water crisis rooted in ‘systemic racism’
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Energy News:
‘Mystery’: Radiation spikes being detected in many countries — US military secretly deploys ‘nuclear sniffer’ aircraft — Radioactivity levels quadrupled — Officials: Iodine-131 is “proof of rather recent release… the origin of which is still unknown”
Black Liberation/ Civil Rights:
February is Black History Month:
From Chapter 5, The New Jim Crow: Obama—the Promise and the Peril By Michelle Alexander
. . . So what is to be demanded in this moment in our nation’s racial history? If the answer is more power, more top jobs, more slots in fancy schools for “us”—a narrow, racially defined us that excludes many—we will continue the same power struggles and can expect to achieve many of the same results. Yes, we may still manage to persuade mainstream voters in the midst of an economic crisis that we have relied too heavily on incarceration, that prisons are too expensive, and that drug use is a public health problem, not a crime.
But if the movement that emerges to end mass incarceration does not meaningfully address the racial divisions and resentments that gave rise to mass incarceration, and if it fails to cultivate an ethic of genuine care, compassion, and concern for every human being—of every class, race, and nationality — within our nation’s borders, including poor whites, who are often pitted against poor people of color, the collapse of mass incarceration will not mean the death of racial caste in America.
Inevitably a new system of racialized social control will emerge—one that we cannot foresee, just as the current system of mass incarceration was not predicted by anyone thirty years ago. No task is more urgent for racial justice advocates today than ensuring that America’s current racial caste system is its last.
Given what is at stake at this moment in history, bolder, more inspired action is required than we have seen to date. Piecemeal, top-down policy reform on criminal justice issues, combined with a racial justice discourse that revolves largely around the meaning of Barack Obama’s election and “post-racialism,” will not get us out of our nation’s racial quagmire. We must flip the script. Taking our cue from the courageous civil rights advocates who brazenly refused to defend themselves, marching unarmed past white mobs that threatened to kill them, we, too, must be the change we hope to create. If we want to do more than just end mass incarceration — if we want to put an end to the history of racial caste in America — we must lay down our racial bribes, join hands with people of all colors who are not content to wait for change to trickle down, and say to those who would stand in our way: Accept all of us or none.
That is the basic message that Martin Luther King Jr. aimed to deliver through the Poor People’s Movement back in 1968. He argued then that the time had come for racial justice advocates to shift from a civil rights to a human rights paradigm, and that the real work of movement building had only just begun. 61
A human rights approach, he believed, would offer far greater hope for those of us determined to create a thriving, multiracial, multiethnic democracy free from racial hierarchy than the civil rights model had provided to date. It would offer a positive vision of what we can strive for — a society in which all human beings of all races are treated with dignity, and have the right to food, shelter, health care, education, and security. 62
This expansive vision could open the door to meaningful alliances between poor and working-class people of all colors, who could begin to see their interests as aligned, rather than in conflict—no longer in competition for scarce resources in a zero-sum game.
A human rights movement, King believed, held revolutionary potential. Speaking at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff retreat in May 1967, he told SCLC staff, who were concerned that the Civil Rights Movement had lost its steam and its direction, “It is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human
rights.” Political reform efforts were no longer adequate to the task at hand, he said. “For the last 12 years, we have been in a reform movement…. [But] after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution. We must see the great distinction between a reform movement and a revolutionary movement. We are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.” 63
More than forty years later, civil rights advocacy is stuck in a model of advocacy King was determined to leave behind. Rather than challenging the basic structure of society and doing the hard work of movement building —the work to which King was still committed at the end of his life — we have been tempted too often by the opportunity for people of color to be included within the political and economic structure as-is, even if it means alienating those who are necessary allies. We have allowed ourselves to be willfully blind to the emergence of a new caste system—a system of social excommunication that has denied millions of African Americans basic human dignity. The significance of this cannot be overstated, for the failure to acknowledge the humanity and dignity of all persons has lurked at the root of every racial caste system. This common thread explains why, in the 1780s, the British Society for the Abolition of Slavery adopted as its official seal a woodcut of a kneeling slave above a banner that read, “AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER?” That symbol was followed more than a hundred years later by signs worn around the necks of black sanitation workers during the Poor People’s Campaign answering the slave’s question with the simple statement, I AM A MAN.
The fact that black men could wear the same sign today in protest of the new caste system suggests that the model of civil rights advocacy that has been employed for the past several decades is, as King predicted, inadequate to the task at hand. If we can agree that what is needed now, at this critical juncture, is not more tinkering or tokenism, but as King insisted
forty years ago, a “radical restructuring of our society,” then perhaps we can also agree that a radical restructuring of our approach to racial justice advocacy is in order as well.
All of this is easier said than done, of course. Change in civil rights organizations, like change in society as a whole, will not come easy. Fully committing to a vision of racial justice that includes grassroots, bottom-up advocacy on behalf of “all of us” will require a major reconsideration of priorities, staffing, strategies, and messages. Egos, competing agendas, career goals, and inertia may get in the way. It may be that traditional civil rights organizations simply cannot, or will not, change. To this it can only be said, without a hint of disrespect: adapt or die.
If Martin Luther King Jr. is right that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice, a new movement will arise; and if civil rights organizations fail to keep up with the times, they will pushed to the side as another generation of advocates comes to the fore.
Hopefully the new generation will be led by those who know best the brutality of the new caste system — a group with greater vision, courage, and determination than the old guard can muster, trapped as they may be in an outdated paradigm. This new generation of activists should not disrespect their elders or disparage their contributions or achievements; to the contrary, they should bow their heads in respect, for their forerunners have expended untold hours and made great sacrifices in an elusive quest for justice. But once respects have been paid, they should march right past them, emboldened, as King once said, by the fierce urgency of now. Those of us who hope to be their allies should not be surprised, if and when this day comes, that when those who have been locked up and locked out finally have the chance to speak and truly be heard, what we hear is rage. The rage may frighten us; it may remind us of riots, uprisings, and buildings aflame. We may be tempted to control it, or douse it with buckets of doubt, dismay, and disbelief. But we should do no such thing. Instead, when a young man who was born in the ghetto and who knows little of life beyond the walls of his prison cell and the invisible cage that has become his life, turns to us in bewilderment and rage, we should do nothing more than look him in the eye and tell him the truth. We should tell him the same truth the great African American writer James Baldwin told his nephew in a letter published in 1962, in one of the most extraordinary books ever written, and searing conviction, Baldwin had this to say to his young nephew: Read More
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
