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 27, 2017
Image of the Day:
The ‘Big Lie’: ‘Social Security is Broke’!
Quotes of the Day:
The American Indian Holocaust, known as the “500 year war” and the “World’s Longest Holocaust In The History Of Mankind And Loss Of Human Lives.” Genocide and Denying It: Why We Are Not Taught that the Natives of the United States and Canada were Exterminated Death Toll: 95,000,000 to 114,000,000 — Native American Genocide
John Steinbeck’s novel “Grapes of Wrath.” Woody Guthrie’s ballad “Deportee.” Edward R. Murrow’s documentary “Harvest of Shame.” Every decade or so, the public is shocked by yet another discovery that migrant farmworkers are being horribly abused by the wealthy masters of the corporate food system. And here we go again. Last November, the New York Times reported that the workers who grow and harvest the cornucopia of fruit and veggies in the rich fields of California’s Salinas Valley live in a constant crisis of poverty, malnutrition and homelessness. Toiling in “America’s salad bowl,” they literally cannot afford to eat the fresh, nutritious edibles they produce. The Valley is a gold mine of groceries, generating billions of dollars in sales that have enriched landowners and corporate executives and turned Salinas Valley into farm country with Silicon Valley prices. Unable to afford good food, the workers eat poorly—85 percent are overweight or obese, and nearly six out of 10 have been diagnosed with diabetes (while many more, uninsured and unable to afford testing, go undiagnosed). Especially appalling, about a third of elementary schoolchildren in the Salinas City district are homeless. They sleep with their families in tents, abandoned buildings, tool sheds, chicken coops, or on the ground, next to the rows of crops they tend. Allowing such abject poverty in our fields of abundance is more than shameful—it’s an oozing sore on our national soul, made even more immoral by the fact that our society throws 40 percent of our food into the garbage. But outrageous treatment of farmworkers is not limited to Salinas—you can likely find it down some rural road near you. When we find it, let’s act on it. Yes, donate money and time to food banks, but it’s even more important for us to join with farmworkers in local, state, and national political actions to STOP this gross, un-American inequity. Adding to the inequality that has affected so many farm workers is the fact that Wall Street has our nation’s farmland. Our nation’s farms conjure up Americana, the old homeplace, and our rich, rural culture. Less bucolic, however, is the assortment of financial trusts and hedge fund hucksters that are buying up these farms and converting them into fast-buck investment packages for super-rich global speculators. One of these Wall Street investment scheme is called Farmland Partners, Inc. It’s run by a couple of slicks trained in mergers and acquisitions as executives at the investment powerhouse, Merrill Lynch. Rather than sodbusters, Farmland Partners are taxbusters, using a legalistic plow called Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) to get enormous tax breaks to subsidize their scheme. With this special subsidy, the Partners have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars from investors to buy up farms and ranches—they now own 295 ag properties covering 144,000 acres in 16 states including California’s Salinas Valley. — Big-Money Speculators Are Buying Up and Renting Out Farms, and Pricing Real Farmers out of the Market
Videos of the Day:
Book: American Nuremberg The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes
The monster that ate America The so called “heath care” industry
Mexican President Nieto Acquiesces to Trump’s Border and Deportation Policies Law professor John Ackerman explains why President Enrique Pena Nieto offers no pushback despite that Donald Trump’s policies and Nieto himself are both deeply unpopular among Mexicans
U.S.:
The Only ‘Victors’ In War: The War Profiteers! There has been perpetual war for perpetual peace since WWI, this Laura Cray political cartoon is from the from page editorial, of the August 18, 1945 Issue of The Militant Newspaper, with the Banner Headline: “There Is No Peace” Could Still Be Published Today!
The Iron Heel of Militarize Destruction and Profits in the Middle East: America’s Massive Mideast Disaster: 15 Years of Sowing Death and Destruction, With No Peace in Sight By Danny Sjursen / TomDispatch 
The Iron Heel of Militarized Destruction and Profits Comes Back Home to Roost: Militarized Police Just Evicted The Sioux Tribe From Standing Rock At Gunpoint By Colin Taylor 
Bannon Admits Trump’s Cabinet Nominees Were Selected to Destroy Their Agencies By Dartagnan
Environment:
Roaming Charges: Exxon’s End Game Theory If there ever was the sound of a doomsday clock chiming midnight, the signal moment probably occurred last fall, though the alarm went almost unnoticed by the press. In October, major observatories across the world simultaneously recorded that atmospheric carbon levels globally breached what has long been considered the “redline” of 400 parts per million and are likely to keep rising inexorably for the foreseeable future. The 400 parts per million mark has long been considered, even by climate optimists, a fatal tipping point, beyond which there is little hope of return. by Jeffrey St. Clair
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Black Liberation/ Civil Rights:
The New Jim Crow overcomes minor 2016 cuts: With DOJ Reversal on Private Prisons, Corporate Jailers Get What They Paid For Reflecting the influence of big donors and corporate interests on the Trump administration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday rescinded the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) 2016 directive to scale back By Deirdre Fulton
February is Black History Month:
Malcolm X Speech: Prospects for Freedom in 1965 (January 7, 1965)
Malcolm X speaking at the New York Militant Labor Forum, 1964 Eli (Lucky) Finer
Mr. Chairman, who’s one of my brothers, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters: It is an honor to me to come back to the Militant Labor Forum again this evening. It’s my third time here. I was just telling my brother up here that probably tomorrow morning the press will try to make it appear that this little chat that we’re having here this evening took place in Peking or someplace else. They have a tendency to discolor things in that way, to try and make people not place the proper importance upon what they hear, especially when they’re hearing it from persons they can’t control, or, as my brother just pointed out, persons whom they consider “irresponsible.”
It’s the third time that I’ve had the opportunity to be a guest of the Militant Labor Forum. I always feel that it is an honor and every time that they open the door for me to do so, I will be right here. The Militant newspaper is one of the best in New York City. In fact, it is one of the best anywhere you go today because everywhere I go I see it. I saw it even in Paris about a month ago; they were reading it over there. And I saw it in some parts of Africa where I was during the summer. I don’t know how it gets there. But if you put the right things in it, what you put in it will see that it gets around.
Tonight, during the few moments that we have, we’re going to have a little chat, like brothers and sisters and friends, and probably enemies too, about the prospects for peace—or the prospects for freedom in 1965. As you notice, I almost slipped and said peace. Actually you can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom. You can’t separate the two—and this is the thing that makes 1965 so explosive and so dangerous.
The people in this country who in the past have been at peace and have been peaceful were that way only because they didn’t know what freedom was. They let somebody else define it for them, but today, 1965, you find those who have not had freedom, and were not in a position to define freedom, are beginning to define it for themselves. And as they get in a position intellectually to define freedom for themselves, they see that they don’t have it, and it makes them less peaceful, or less inclined towards peace.
In 1964, oppressed people all over the world, in Africa, in Asia and Latin America, in the Caribbean, made some progress. Northern Rhodesia threw off the yoke of colonialism and became Zambia, and was accepted into the United Nations, the society of independent governments. Nyasaland became Malawi and also was accepted into the UN, into the family of independent governments. Zanzibar had a revolution, threw out the colonialists and their lackeys and then united with Tanganyika into what is now known as the Republic of Tanzania—which is progress, indeed.
Also in 1964, the oppressed people of South Vietnam, and in that entire Southeast Asia area, were successful in fighting off the agents of imperialism. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men haven’t enabled them to put North and South Vietnam together again. Little rice farmers, peasants, with a rifle—up against all the highly-mechanized weapons of warfare—jets, napalm, battleships, everything else, and they can’t put those rice farmers back where they want them. Somebody’s waking up.
In the Congo, the People’s Republic of the Congo, headquartered at Stanleyville, fought a war for freedom against Tshombe, who is an agent for Western imperialism—and by Western imperialism I mean that which is headquartered in the United States, in the State Department.
In 1964 this government, subsidizing Tshombe, the murderer of Lumumba, and Tshombe’s mercenaries, hired killers from South Africa, along with the former colonial power, Belgium, dropped paratroopers on the people of the Congo, used Cubans, that they had trained, to drop bombs on the people of the Congo with American-made planes—to no avail. The struggle is still going on, and America’s man, Tshombe, is still losing.
All of this in 1964. Now, in speaking like this, it doesn’t mean that I am anti-American. I am not. I’m not anti-American, or un-American. And I’m not saying that to defend myself. Because if I was that, I’d have a right to be that — after what America has done to us. This government should feel lucky that our people aren’t anti-American. They should get down on their hands and knees every morning and thank God that 22 million black people have not become anti-American. You’ve given us every right to. The whole world would side with us, if we became anti-American. You know, that’s something to think about.
But we are not anti-American. We are anti or against what America is doing wrong in other parts of the world as well as here. And what she did in the Congo in 1964 is wrong. It’s criminal, criminal. And what she did to the American public, to get the American public to go along with it, is criminal. What she’s doing in South Vietnam is criminal. She’s causing American soldiers to be murdered every day, killed every day, die every day, for no reason at all. That’s wrong. Now, you’re not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or who says it. Read More
