Daily News Digest September 13, 2017

Daily News Digest Archives

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 Those  Who Profit From Austerity! Under Austerity, All of the World Will Eventually Be Pauperized, Humbled, and Desecrated Like Greece and Puerto Rico!

Daily News Digest September 13, 2017 

Image of the Day:

Hurricane scientists have never seen an image like this before Quotes of the Day:

The only solution for capitalism, at this time is the worldwide application of the The Iron Heal, as described by Jack London in his book, The Iron Heal. In the United States it has already laid the basis for its implementation through ‘terrorist legislation’ to eliminate the Bill of Rights. The cops have attacked all occupy wall street demonstrations and they have escalated violence in the minority and working class communities and have written laws to encourage vigilante ‘first strike’ ‘justice’ and which as Michelle Alexander describes as The New Jim Crow, the establishment of a prison slavery system that will eventually be used for all of us. Now is the time to reorganize all anti-capitalist forces and fighters for working class emancipation and self-determination for people oppressed by capitalism for the rebuilding of a new revolutionary political organization to organize and build our combined power to overturn capitalism that is, in its death agony, waging war, famine, pestilence, and death, and the globalization of global warming throughout the world. — Roland Sheppard, The United States ‘Principal of Preventive Strike’and The Establishment of Governmental Vigilante Justice’ 

Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, there are a few things that are pretty clear. One is simply that sea levels are rising. And sea level rise is actually accelerating, owing in large part to ice melt, accelerating ice melt, off of Greenland, actually. So we know that pretty clearly. And if you have higher sea levels, obviously, when you get a storm surge, it’s going to go higher and further inland. So that’s a very, you know, basic connection between hurricanes and sea level rise. Then we also know that hurricanes draw their power—how they get their energy is from the surface waters of the ocean. So, that’s why we only get hurricanes in the summertime, right? Because they need warm water. And as water temperatures rise, theories suggest and models suggest that hurricane strength is going to rise. So, you’re getting this kind of weird argument about hurricane frequency. That’s not clear, what’s going to happen to hurricane frequency as water temperatures rise. But hurricane strength should rise, and we probably are already seeing that. And the third thing we know is that warmer air holds more moisture. We’re getting more evaporation. And as you get more evaporation, you’re going to get more rain. And that’s pretty clear that we’re also seeing that, too, not necessarily in hurricanes, but just in rainfall, in general. We’re getting more of these very massive downpours. And that’s quite well documented.  

Nonetheless, the quality of government reporting has deteriorated sharply in the last couple of decades. Reporting problems have included methodological changes to economic reporting that have pushed headline economic and inflation results out of the realm of real-world or common experience. Over the decades, well in excess of 1,000 presentations have been given on the economic outlook, or on approaches to analyzing economic data, to clients—large and small—including talks with members of the business, banking, government, press, academic, brokerage and investment communities. I also have provided testimony before Congress (details here).  An old friend—the late-Doug Gillespie—asked me some years back to write a series of articles on the quality of government statistics.  The response to those writings (the Primer Series available at the top-center of this page) was so strong that we started ShadowStats.com (Shadow Government Statistics) in 2004.  The newsletter is published as part of my economic consulting services. — John Williams 

Videos of the Day: 

Democracy Now: Elizabeth Kolbert An Honest Conversation About Climate Change Is Needed in Wake of Irma & Harvey

School Segregation is Making a Comeback The U.S. education system was designed to favor the white and the rich, and you ‘don’t have to wave a confederate flag or have a statue of Robert E. Lee to effectively secede from your court-mandated school-desegregation order,’ says the Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford

U.S.: 

Civil Rights/Black Liberation:

Betsy DeVos’ Rollback of Campus Sexual Assault Rules Puts Black Women at Risk Each year at this time, college students return to campus, ready for new experiences. While most students’ experiences will include lectures and football games, a few unfortunate students will experience something else: sexual assault. Unwanted sexual contact is rampant on America’s campuses. To grasp the magnitude of the problem, consider this: twenty-five percent of college women have been sexually assaulted or unwanted sexual contact on campus.  Thus, at any given college, for every four female students one likely experienced a sexual assault during the pursuit of her degree. Black women are more likely than white women to face a sexual assault during their college years. For that reason, the rollback of campus sexual assault rules announced by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will be particularly harmful to Black women. By Nareissa Smith The Awakening of Colin Kaepernick In college, Kaepernick began a journey that led him to his position as one of the most prominent, if divisive, social activists in sports. By John BranchBlack Agenda Radio, Week of September 11, 2017

Peace and Enviro Activists Seek Collaboration: Anti-war and environmental activists will hold a joint conference at American University, in Washington DC, September 22 and 23, to foster closer collaboration between the two movements. Historically, said veteran peace activist David Swanson, the big environmental groups “don’t think it’s strategic to get involved with offending funders and media outlets by taking on the ‘patriotic’ public warmongering machine.” The U.S. military is the world’s biggest polluter.

U.S. Rulers Seen As Illegitimate: American government, business and media institutions have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people, said Duboisian scholar Dr. Anthony Monteiro. “This is a real opportunity for movement building, for coalition building,” said Montiero. “The growing contradiction between the majority of the American people and the elite is probably sharper than at any time in the last 70 years.”

Make the Cops Accountable: The Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations and its allies will present a resolution to the Philadelphia City Council, this week, demanding Black community control of the police. Coalition spokesman Diop Olugbala said the resolution proposes that a commission, “democratically elected on the block and neighborhood level,” would be empowered to “hire, fire, train and discipline police forces in our community.”

Swiping It Forward” in the NYC Subways: The Coalition to End Broken Windows Policing has been descending into the New York City subway system, urging folks with unlimited fare cards to swipe entrance for young and poor riders, so they won’t be swept up by the cops for turnstile hopping. “We’re also highlighting the increase in homelessness because of increasing rents,” said activist Lauren Concepcion.

Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:am ET on PRN. Length: one hour. 

Environment:

Stop talking right now about the threat of climate change. It’s here; it’s happening  For the sake of keeping things manageable, let’s confine the discussion to a single continent and a single week: North America over the last seven days. In Houston they got down to the hard and unromantic work of recovery from what economists announced was probably the most expensive storm in US history, and which weather analysts confirmed was certainly the greatest rainfall event ever measured in the country – across much of its spread it was a once-in-25,000-years storm, meaning 12 times past the birth of Christ; in isolated spots it was a once-in-500,000-years storm, which means back when we lived in trees. Meanwhile, San Francisco not only beat its all-time high temperature record, it crushed it by 3F, which should be pretty much statistically impossible in a place with 150 years (that’s 55,000 days) of record-keeping. By Bill McKibben

The Great Flood How many times will we rebuild Florida’s cities, Houston, coastal New Jersey, New Orleans and other population centers ravaged by storms lethally intensified by global warming? At what point, surveying the devastation and knowing more is inevitable, will we walk away, leaving behind vast coastal dead zones? Will we retreat even further into magical thinking to cope with the fury we have unleashed from the natural world? Or will we respond rationally and radically alter our relationship to this earth that gives us life? By Chris Hedges Trouble in the air: Herbicide dicamba blamed for crop damage.  Dozens of Ohio Valley farmers say the herbicide dicamba has damaged crops and a quirk of the region’s climate may be increasing the risks. Ohio Valley ReSource. By Nicole Erwin

Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:

I Was an Exxon-Funded Climate Scientist . . .  Specifically, researchers Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes found that at least 80 percent of the internal documents and peer-reviewed publications they studied from between 1977 and 2014 were consistent with the state of the science _ acknowledging that climate change is real and caused by humans, and identifying “reasonable uncertainties” that any climate scientist would agree with at the time. Yet over 80 percent of Exxon’s editorial-style paid advertisements over the same period specifically focused on uncertainty and doubt, the study found. by Katharine Hayhoe 

Labor: 

                                            Economy:                                            

Study By MIT Economist: U.S. Has Regressed To A Third-World Nation For Most Of Its Citizens America divided – this concept increasingly graces political discourse in the U.S., pitting left against right, conservative thought against the liberal agenda. But for decades, Americans have been rearranging along another divide, one just as stark if not far more significant – a chasm once bridged by a flourishing middle class.  by Yossarian Johnson

     Welfare for Wall Street: Fees on Retirement Accounts Twenty or 30 years ago, most middle-class workers had defined benefit pensions. This meant that they could count on a fixed benefit that was some fraction of their average salary during their working years. For example, a person who spent 30 years at a company may be entitled to a pension that was equal to 60 percent of their average salary over their final five years of work. With a defined benefit pension system, most of the risk was born by the employer. The worker did not have to worry about the stock market being down when she chose to retire. Nor did it matter to her if the pension made bad investment choices; the employer was liable for the promised benefits, unless it went bankrupt. By Dean Baker Wall Street Is Attempting to Clone Loyal, Non-Whistleblower Workers Last month, Reuters reported that Goldman Sachs was planning “to begin” using personality tests to assist it in hiring personnel “in its banking, trading and finance and risk divisions.” By Pam Martens and Russ Martens 

World: 

Hurricane Irma Unleashes the Forces of Privatization in Puerto Rico Vultures circling the wreckage of Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Irma are closing in on a long-sought prize: the privatizing of the island’s electric utility. ByKate Aronoff, Angel Manuel Soto, and Averie Timm

The Rationality of Kim Jong-un (and His Nukes) Kim Jong-un is not mad. Quite the contrary. He has pulled off a wholly rational feat. By producing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles capable of delivering them to U.S. territory, Pyongyang has obtained near-assurance that the U.S. will not attack it, in (yet another) attempt at regime change. by Gary Leupp

Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:

Airline staff fume over toxic air on planes. A growing number of flight attendants and pilots want answers from airlines about what they say is toxic air on board flights. Deutsche Welle, Germany.

 We’re more likely to get cancer than to get married. This is a wake-up call By Ranjana Srivastava