Daily News Digest November 3, 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 The  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 November 3, 2017

 Images of the Day:

Bendib: One Way to Weather Extreme Climate Missouri CompromiseQuotes of the Day:

Unlike the Whitefish contract, the Cobra deal with PREPA involved heavy input from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which — according to a recent conference call convened by Mammoth Energy Services — was “in the room” and there “every step of the way” as it was being meted out so as to be in line with the agency’s reimbursement requirements. (Neither FEMA nor PREPA representatives have responded to The Intercept’s multiple requests for comment.) . . . “We expect this to be a credit to our corporate margin,” an unidentified Mammoth executive (likely Chief Financial Officer Mark Layton) said on the conference call. “Quite honestly, we wouldn’t have entered this contract if we didn’t think we’d get paid.” .“The Cobra contract is less flashy and less obviously crazy,” Cathy Kunkel, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told The Intercept. “But together with [the Whitefish contract] shows the nexus of PREPA with oil and gas interests — the kind of companies that are go-to companies for PREPA.” Mammoth, Cobra’s parent firm, is primarily an oilfield services company, with several smaller subsidiaries selling a range of support offerings to fracking and other fossil fuel extraction operations. HBC Investments, one of Whitefish’s major financiers, owns several fossil fuel holdings. PREPA itself, like most island energy systems, is also inordinately dependent on imported oil, generating 47.4 percent of its power from that source alone. PREPA is currently $9 billion in debt and gives more than $1 billion a year to off-island oil and gas companies. Yet even as the utility’s leadership has acknowledged that its fiscal sustainability relies on a transition away from oil, its plan has been to transition not to distributed renewables — which are more resilient to storms — but to centralized natural gas. In 2010, Puerto Rico’s legislature set out a plan to get a full 12 percent of energy from renewables by 2015. As of 2015, just 3.3 percent of its power was derived from clean energy. Nearly a third of the island’s generating capacity, meanwhile, came from natural gas, and PREPA’s plan for 2035 includes the construction of a $400 million liquid natural gas import terminal. Currently, all signs point to PREPA rebuilding its energy system back to the pre-storm status quo — or worse. — There’s a Shady Puerto Rico Contract You Didn’t Hear About

The CIA has pulled off one of the greatest psychological ops of all time, converting the bulk of elected officials representing the most left-leaning, anti-war constituency in the U.S. — Black people — into rabid Russia-haters. It’s a good bet that the recent release of nearly 3,000 previously classified documents detailing the CIA’s history of domestic and international terrorism, false flag operations and regime change schemes, will have little political effect on the agency’s credibility on all things Russian. Although the CIA has become, if anything, more murderous with time, the imperial populace is immensely forgiving of crimes against weaker peoples. Most politically aware Americans already knew the CIA waged biological warfare against Cuban crops, and attempted scores of times to assassinate Fidel Castro; that one of Eisenhower’s last acts was to order the death of Congolese president Patrice Lumumba; and that the CIA considered the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s elected leader a great feat. The new batch of documents, related to the assassination of President John Kennedy, details a CIA scheme to stage bombings in Miami and even sink a “boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida” and blame it on Castro, at the risk of killing innocent people. However, it is well known that CIA operatives actually did carry out lethal bombings in Cuba, and destroyed a Cuban airliner full of passengers. The CIA killed 50,000 Vietnamese in Operation Phoenix and collaborated in the slaughter and disappearance of tens of thousands of Latin Americans. In league with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the CIA literally created the international jihadist network that became al Qaeda and its off-shoots around the world, resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands. And almost every sentient American knows the CIA gave thumbs up to “intelligence” claiming Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction. “In league with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the CIA literally created the international jihadist network that became al Qaeda and its off-shoots around the world.” To compile a list of the CIA’s crimes, is to describe U.S. foreign policy since the agency’s founding in 1947. The CIA has never been a law unto itself. It is the clandestine arm of U.S. foreign policy, and carries out the objectives of the U.S. ruling class — or various factions of that class. Its mission is maintenance and expansion of an empire that is not subject to the laws that constrain other nations. That is the meaning of American “exceptionalism.” Those Americans that regularly “forgive” CIA crimes understand that it acts in service of U.S. empire. The problem is not that these people are so enamored of the CIA and its dark works, but that they identify with U.S. power in the world, and lack solidarity with the rest of humanity. This applies to millions of folks that think of themselves as “progressive,” as well as Trump’s “delplorables.” — In CIA We Trust

Videos of the Day:

Indigenous Activists Fight the ‘Standing Rock of the North’ The proposed Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion would run through 518 kilometers of Secwepemc territory. Kanahus Manuel of the Secwepemc Women’s Warrior Society discusses Indigenous activists’ struggle to stop the expansion

 Code Pink Conference: Divest from the War Machine Larry Wilkerson: “We have become a national security state, that means our reason for existing is war and defense contractors are the merchants of death”

Sometimes the TV weatherman tells the truth

U.S.:

The Antiwar Movement, Class of 1968 Ken Burns “Vietnam War” documentary seems to emphasize the anti-war movement harassing returning veterans by name calling or spitting—an accusation I never heard of until the mid-1990s. by Julia SteinThere’s a Shady Puerto Rico Contract You Didn’t Hear About National outrage has led to the cancellation of a suspicious $300 million contract doled out to a tiny Montana company that was oddly tasked with rebuilding large parts of Puerto Rico’s electric grid. A separate $200 million contract has faced little scrutiny, but may ultimately be even more scandalous for what it says about the effort to rebuild the island in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. By Kate Aronoff

Walls and Militarized Police: How Israel Is Exporting Its Occupation to the United States Israeli footprints are becoming more apparent in the US security apparatus. Such a fact does not bode well for ordinary Americans. US Senate Bill S.720 should have been a wake-up call. The Bill, drafted by the Israel lobby group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), as part of its “2017 Lobbying Agenda” is set to punish any individual or company that boycotts Israel for its violation of Palestinian human rights. by Ramzy Baroud

By Killing ISIS Fighters Instead of Bringing Them to Justice, We Become as Guilty as Our Enemies A profoundly important, unprecedented and dangerous decision has  been taken by European leaders in the past few days. It’s not made as explicit as it should be – because our leaders are always careful to erect a bodyguard of verbiage and lies to protect them if something goes wrong – but it’s perfectly clear that they want any foreign fighters in Isis to be killed when they are found. It’s not a question of whether they deserve to live or die – they have cut the throats of innocents, including my journalist colleagues, and they have raped women and enslaved children. We know that, and we are aware that their vicious cult has not yet ended. Isis is still alive. by Robert FiskEnvironment:

Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:

Power-line restart device implicated in past wildfires

Black Liberation/Civil Rights:

In CIA We Trust  “The imperial populace is immensely forgiving of crimes against weaker peoples.” More than a year after the Democrats began blaming Hillary Clinton’s campaign problems on Russia, the allegations of massive Kremlin interference in U.S. elections are still based on the “high confidence” – but evidence-free – CIA assertion that Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. One cannot imagine a less credible authority than the agency headquartered in Langley, Virginia: an organization specializing in disinformation, mass psychological manipulation, false flag operations, assassination, and regime change. No single entity in modern history, foreign or domestic, has told more lies — and been caught bloody-handed, during or after the fact — than the CIA. Glen Ford, BAR executive editor Labor:

Economy:

World:

Arab Public Opinion and the Balfour Declaration Listen to the voices nobody wanted to hear. Read the words of those whose painstaking work as part of the 1919 King-Crane Commission, national treatises and general assemblies were shelved in dusty oblivion just after the 1919 Paris Peace Conference by which time the fate of the Middle East had already been determined, Arab public opinion notwithstanding. by Jennifer LoewensteinRacism, Propaganda And Wars This week, the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which promoted giving Palestine to the Jewish people, will be celebrated in London. Around the world, there will be protests against it calling for Britain to apologize for the damage it inflicted. Students from the West Bank and Gaza will send letters to the British government describing the negative impacts that the Balfour Declaration, and the Nakba in 1948, continue to have on their lives today.  by Kevin Zeese – Margaret Flowers

Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:

The Unsound Logic of Charter Schooling Although there are numerous problematic aspects of many charter schools that rightfully garner a great deal of public attention—their growing for-profit nature, their inability to accommodate students with special needs, the low pay for their teachers, etc.—one rarely hears that charter schooling, as it is currently practiced, is essentially an inferior version of traditional public schooling with uniforms. This fixation on school uniforms—which, despite the rhetoric of educational innovation, is often the only thing noticeably distinct about many charters—emerged as different aspects of the school choice movement converged and points to the underlying and unsound logic of charter schooling. by Paul J. Ramsey

The Missouri Compromise and General Kelly In 1820, a law known as the Missouri Compromise was passed in the US Congress.  The law made Missouri a slave state and Maine a free state. In addition, the law prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of the 36° 30´ latitude line. The Missouri Compromise was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854.  This act gave each new state the power to decide whether or not it would be a slave state via the popular vote.  In turn this decision created a situation where pro and anti-slavery forces would flood each new state in an effort to affect the vote. Three years later the Supreme Court declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional in the Dred Scott decision.  That decision ruled that Congress did not have the authority to prohibit slavery in the territories.  It is also perhaps best known for the phrase in the majority opinion that stated that blacks “blacks had no rights which whites had to recognize.” by Ron Jacobs

Top 10 lies about the Bolshevik Revolution: parts one and two No other event in human history has been the subject of more distortions, falsehoods and fabrications the Russian Revolution. We publish here Alex Grant’s complete list of the 10 biggest downright lies about the Bolsheviks and October…

Capitalists alarmed about capitalism Rob Sewell looks at the damning condemnations against the capitalist system being uttered by none other than the capitalists themselves. By examining the ominous warnings of the Financial Times – a key bourgeois mouthpiece 100 years ago, the Russian masses – led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks – changed the course of history by taking power in the October Revolution. The International Marxist Tendency is hosting a series of meetings and discussion.