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During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three Point Political Program: 1. Austerity, 2. Scapegoating Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal Immigrants’ for Unemployment, and 3. The Iron Heel.
Democracy?: 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!
Made in the U.S.A.: World faces worst humanitarian crisis since 1945, says UN official Twenty million people face starvation without an immediate injection of funds in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria, warns Stephen O’Brien
Image of the Day:
Deferred maintenance is the practice of postponing maintenance activities such as repairs on both real property (i.e. infrastructure) and personal property (i.e. machinery) in order to save costs, meet budget funding levels, or realign available budget monies. — Deferred maintenance – Wikipedia
. . . In 1942, there were 110,000 Japanese American citizens in good standing, law-abiding people who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That’s all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had: “Right this way” into the internment camps! Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most, their government took them away! And rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. . . . — George Carlin, It’s Bad for Ya (2008), “You Have No Rights”.
My life has recently intersected, in a most personal way, two of Mark Twain’s famous quips. One I shall defer to the end of this essay. The other (sometimes attributed to Disraeli), identifies three species of mendacity, each worse than the one before — lies, damned lies, and statistics! . . . — Stephen Jay Gould, The Median Isn’t the Message
Videos of the Day:
U.S.:
The Mendacity of the United States Government: Roaming Charges: the Gang That Couldn’t Tweet Straight James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence under Obama, is one of the most peculiar figures of our time. Until Jeff Sessions, Clapper was infamous for having committed one of the most flagrant acts of perjury before Congress, when he flatly denied to Oregon Senator Ron Wyden that the NSA was collecting data on millions of Americans. The exchange is worth revisiting. by Jeffrey St. Clair
The Invasion of Syria Escalates: Trump Escalates Unchecked War with U.S. Marines Now Inside Syria Deployment may be signal that Trump administration will give Pentagon more flexibility in calling shots in fight by Nadia Prupis 
Patrick Cockburn Yemen is a complicated and unwinnable war. Trump should stay out The Trump administration is making its first radical policy change in the Middle East by escalating American involvement in the civil war in Yemen. Wrecked by years of conflict, the unfortunate country will supposedly be the place where the US will start to confront and roll back Iranian influence in the region as a whole.
Robert Fisk Trump opens his arms to immigrants — only if they’re white Canadians Faced with an avalanche of tourist cancellations from Canada, congressmen are letting Canadians of 55 and over who own or rent property in the US stay there for an extra two months a year
Environment:
While carbon dioxide is typically painted as the bad boy of greenhouse gases, methane is roughly 30 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas. New research in the journal Nature indicates that for each degree that the Earth’s temperature rises, the amount of methane entering the atmosphere from microorganisms dwelling in lake sediment and freshwater wetlands — the primary sources of the gas — will increase several times. As temperatures rise, the relative increase of methane emissions will outpace that of carbon dioxide from these sources, the researchers report. — A more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, methane emissions will leap as Earth warms (Nature)
Trump Cuts Regulations as Oceanic Dead Zones Release Massive Amounts of Methane By Dahr Jamail 
A Crisis With No End: Why Flint is Still the Issue Last year the water crisis in Flint, Michigan made headlines for weeks, even though by the time it finally did the damage was done. The water that residents of Flint were forced to drink, over 100,000 of them, was tainted with lead, lots of it. Upwards of 12,000 children, most from minority, poor neighborhoods, had elevated levels of the metal in their blood. Today, the lead in Flint’s water has taken a physical, as well as a mental toll on those impacted and the water is still tainted by Joshua Frank 
Trump Administration Pressing for Appeal, Dismissal of Climate Lawsuit The Trump administration is asking an Oregon federal judge in the Our Children’s Trust case to let a higher court review her decision to permit a historic climate change lawsuit to proceed, and to halt the case pending the outcome of that review. In 2015, a group of 21 young plaintiffs aged 9 to 20 from all over the United States, along with renowned climate scientist James Hansen, who is acting as guardian for future generations, sued the federal government for allegedly violating their constitutional rights via policies that promote global warming. By Dan Zegart 
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
“I spoke to Arnie Gundersen, who’s a nuclear engineer, and he said that the robot did pick up structural damage to the building of Unit 2, which means it makes it unstable should there be another earthquake greater than 7 on the Richter scale — which then means the building could collapse, which then means that would collapse onto the molten core, and also with the spent fuel rods which are incredibly radioactive in the spent fuel pool, they would go down as well. A huge amount of radiation would be released, such that it would be the end of Japan and certainly, very much radioactive fallout in the Northern Hemisphere such that I would probably get my family from Boston to come straight away to Australia. — Dr. Helen Haldicott
Black Liberation/ Civil Rights:
Women before, during and after the Russian Revolution The history of Bolshevism from the very early days right up to the Russian revolution contains a wealth of lessons on how it is the class struggle that provides the final answer to the women’s question. In this article Marie Frederiksen looks at the approach of the Bolshevik Party to the women’s question from its early days, right through to the revolution and after taking power. By Marie Frederiksen 
Labor:
Economy:
The Shadow Government Statistics Alternate Unemployment Rate for February, 2017 is 22.7%. The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers. The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment. 
World:
Capitalism will plunder countries with a six-gun and/or with a fountain pen.: The Final Pillage: Greece to Surrender Gold, Real Estate, Utilities in Exchange for More Debt and Austerity Germany’s announcement that it will not allow debt relief for the troubled EU nation will force Greece to auction off the last of its assets and sign over its remaining sovereignty to the EU bureaucracy. By Whitney Webb 
Tories laugh at Hammond’s sick joke of a Budget Chancellor Philip Hammond’s spring Budget was presented by the media as something of a non-event – unless you happened to be poor, reliant on public services, or self-employed on a zero-hours contract that is. By Steve Jones 
North of Ireland elections: a historic shift The elections on 2nd March to the Northern Ireland Assembly have served to shatter all of the old certainties enshrined in the sectarian monolith established by the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), now languishing in crisis. The elections have done nothing to shift the political deadlock. Instead they have brought to the surface all of the contradictions in the North, reflected in a sea-change in the balance of forces, with unionism losing its majority for the first time since partition. By Ben Curry
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
Quotes of the Day:
Trump’s Budget Draft Takes Axe to Low Income Housing Funds Declaring the budget proposal ‘unconscionable and unacceptable,’ housing advocate warns that ‘draconian cuts could cause homelessness’ by Lauren McCauley
The Government Remains the Enemy of the People by John W. Whitehead