Daily News Digest March 2, 2017

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 March 2, 2017

During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three Point Political Program:  1. Austerity, 2. Scapegoating Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal Immigrents’ for Unemployment, and 3. The Iron Heel.

Image of the Day:

The 98%’s Spending for Social Programs: Just $22.36 a Year — Spending for the War Machine: $575 a Year and Spending for the 1%’s Welfare: $368! Quotes of the Day: 

My point was that the way the economy is described in the press and in University courses has very little to do with how the economy really works. The press and journalistic reports use a terminology made of well crafted euphemisms to confuse understanding of how the economy works. In addition to giving key words to explain what’s positive and how to understand the economy, I discuss the misleading vocabulary, the Orwellian double-think used by the media, bank lobbyists and corporate lobbyists to persuade people that austerity and running into debt is the key to wealth, not its antithesis. The aim is to make them act against their own interests, by drawing a fictitious picture of the economy as if it’s a parallel universe.  If you can make people use a vocabulary and concepts that make it appear that when the 1% gets richer, the whole economy is getting richer – or when GDP goes up, everybody is improving – then the people, the 95% who did not improve their position from 2008 to 2016 somehow can be made to suffer from the Stockholm syndrome. They’ll think, “Gee, it must be my fault. If the whole economy is growing, why am I so worse off? If only we can give more money to the top 5% or the 1%, it’ll all trickle down. We’ve got to cut taxes and help them so they can give me a job because as Trump and other people said, Well, I never met a poor person who gave me a job.”  I’ve met a lot of rich people, and instead of giving people jobs when they buy a company, they usually make money for themselves by firing people, downsizing and outsourcing labor. So you’re not going to get the rich necessarily giving you jobs. But if people can somehow think that there’s an association between wealth at the top and more employment, and that you have to cut the taxes on the wealthy because it’ll all trickle down, then they have an upside-down view of how the economy works. — Michael Hudson, The Fictitious Economy: Hiding How the Economy Really Works

Video of the Day:

‘Shell knew’: oil giant’s 1991 film warned of climate change danger

U.S.:

Scapegoating Illegal Immigrants as the Cause of Unemployment and the False Assumption About Immigration and Crime — The Biggest Lies in Trumps Speech:

Capitalism is the Cause of Unemployment:

But if a surplus labouring population is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. — Karl Marx, Das Capital

From this it is clear that English manufacture must have, at all times save the brief periods of highest prosperity, an unemployed reserve army of workers, in order to be able to produce the masses of goods required by the market in the liveliest months. This reserve army is larger or smaller, according as the state of the market occasions the employment of a larger or smaller proportion of its members. — Federick Engles

Calls Mount Everywhere for Deportation of Illegal Immigrants With economic crisis and high unemployment rates, governments target illegal immigrants By Joseph Chamie and Barry MirkinThe Criminalization of Immigration in the United States  For more than a century, innumerable studies have confirmed two simple yet powerful truths about the relationship between immigration and crime: immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes or be behind bars than the native-born, and high rates of immigration are associated with lower rates of violent crime and property crime. This holds true for both legal immigrants and the unauthorized, regardless of their country of origin or level of education. In other words, the overwhelming majority of immigrants are not “criminals” by any commonly accepted definition of the term. For this reason, harsh immigration policies are not effective in fighting crime. Unfortunately, immigration policy is frequently shaped more by fear and stereotype than by empirical evidence. As a result, immigrants have the stigma of “criminality” ascribed to them by an ever-evolving assortment of laws and immigration-enforcement mechanisms. Put differently, immigrants are being defined more and more as threats. Whole new classes of “felonies” have been created which apply only to immigrants, deportation has become a punishment for even minor offenses, and policies aimed at trying to end unauthorized immigration have been made more punitive rather than more rational and practical. In short, immigrants themselves are being criminalized. By Walter Ewing, Ph.D., Daniel E. Martínez, Ph.D. and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Ph.D. 

It’s Time to Start Calling Evangelicals What They Are: The American Taliban By JC Weatherby Black Liberation/ Civil Rights: 

Researchers: Police likely provoke protestors — not the other way around New research from Berkeley shows that police are often the agitators of violence By Ian Blair

The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site’ By Spencer Ackerman

* Secret interrogation facility reveals aspects of war on terror in US

* ‘They disappeared us’: protester details 17-hour shackling without basic rights

* Accounts describe police brutality, missing 15-year-old and one man’s death

* Latest: Follow the Guardian’s investigation into Chicago’s Homan Square

An Open Letter to the Michigan Civil Rights Commission on Their Report: “Systemic Racism Through the Lens of Flint” There were some positive aspects to the report on the poisoning of Flint, Michigan. But, the commission left the responsible officials off the hook, as if “racism” exists without “racists.” The Governor and his men knew exactly what they were doing to the people of Flint, just as they knew what they were doing to the people of Detroit, through their Emergency Financial Manager regimes. “There’s nothing unconscious about their racist evil.” by Tom Stephens The African Union Needs a Total Overhaul, Not Mere Reform The fundamental problem of the African Union is ideological. And no one typifies this crisis better than Paul Kagame, the terrifying tyrant and imperialist stooge of Uganda. His new report proposing remedies for reforming the Union belongs in the dustbin. The AU does not need reform. It needs a radical transformation taking it back to its Pan-Africanist roots. by Henry Makori Freedom Rider: Liberals Expose Themselves Democrats and phony progressives talk a lot about mounting a great “resistance” to Donald Trump, yet gave Barack Obama a blank check to pursue much the same policies. Trump will find it difficult to exceed Obama in deportations, and damn near impossible to best him in bailing out corporations or attacking other countries. Trump’s rise has caused the Democrats to show their true colors as the party of war and the (deep) national security state. by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley Contrary to White Liberal Opinion, Donald Trump is no Communist Feeling not a bit ridiculous, so-called progressives carry signs depicting the right-wing billionaire Donald Trump under a hammer and sickle flag. “The Democratic Party and its loyal white liberal base have spearheaded a dangerous Neo-McCarthyist campaign that pits anyone who doesn’t align with the Democratic Party line a dupe of the Russian government.” The truth is, Trump is a (ruling) classmate of Clinton. It’s a war within the One Percent. by Danny Haiphong Maryland County Commission Favors Developer Over African Burial GroundWhen a planning board in a wealthy Washington suburb sided with developers that want to obliterate an African burial ground, the only concession they made to Blacks was to use ground radar to search for human remains — as if there is a question of who lies there. One protester asked: “They going to use radar on Lincoln’s tomb? Or the Unknown Soldier? Or Kennedy’s grave in Arlington to determine if those sites are still holy?” by BAR Editor and Columnist Dr. Marsha Adebayo What Explains the Racial Wealth Divide? Despite mountains of facts, two-thirds of Americans continue to insist Institutional racism is not the root of social inequality. Instead, they locate the problem in individual behavior, or in lack of education, or single-parent households. Yet, “white two-parent households turn out to have ten times more wealth than the equivalent black families,” Black folks are no more spendthrift than whites, and education counts for less than white skin. by Josh Hoxie

 On Trump’s Pro-Policing Executive Orders: Keep Fighting, Keep Resisting Increases in policing produces these results: insecurity; broken families and occupied communities; divestment of public resources for education, health, recreation, housing; disenfranchisement for communities targeted by policing and courts; fear and hatred; more inequality; more racism; more human rights abuses; more violence; public debt as the militarized state redoubles itself; and environmental injustice. by Critical Resistance Labor:

Environment:

Sand mining: the global environmental crisis you’ve probably never heard of  From Cambodia to California, industrial-scale sand mining is causing wildlife to die, local trade to wither and bridges to collapse. And booming urbanisation means the demand for this increasingly valuable resource is unlikely to let up. By Vince Beiser Siberia’s ‘doorway to the Underworld’ Is Getting So Big It’s Uncovering Ancient Forests A doorway to 200,000 years ago. It’s no secret that Siberia’s permafrost has been on thin ice lately. Conditions are varying so much that huge holes are appearing out of nowhere, and, in some places, tundra is quite literally bubbling underneath people’s feet. But new research has revealed that one of the biggest craters in the region, known by the local Yakutian people as the ‘doorway to the underworld’, is growing so rapidly that it’s uncovering long-buried forests, carcasses, and up to 200,000 years of historical climate records. By Fiona MacDonald Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:

Energy News:

Watch Professor links die-offs on US West Coast to Fukushima radiation — “Nobody has any idea what to do about the continuing contamination” — River flowing under plant with “molten fuel on the bottom” and it’s going into ocean (VIDEO)

Economy:

The Fictitious Economy: Hiding How the Economy Really Works by Sharmini Peries – Michael Hudson Shadow Government Statistics Consumer Price Index World:

Spain Just Did the Opposite of What the U.S. Does: Fmr IMF Chief Sent to Jail As Spain Prosecutes 65 Elite Bankers in Enormous Corruption Scandal Rodrigo Rato becomes the third IMF chief in only 2 years to be prosecuted,… By The Free Thought Project A Paradigm Shift in the Middle East: Iran as the Solution, Not the Problem by Behrooz Ghamari Tabrizi  Health, Science, Education, and Welfare: