Monday News in August 31, 2015

Donald Trump is certainly an extremist. People have called him anti-establishment when he isn’t. He is part of the same capitalist system that allows him to run for President. Trump’s rhetoric is blatantly nativist. Many people like Trump talk about the budget. The myth is that the federal government has to balance the budget in the strictest terms in order to get the federal deficit in check. We know that spending cuts to balance the budget is a policy that results in a shrinking tax base, which will require more spending cuts to balance the budget. Federal government spending is the main driver of real production, so increased government spending correlates to an increased tax base. This is why some people want to use a credit stimulus using low interest rates. We know that Trump is a racist, a war monger, a neoliberal, a speculator, a xenophobe, a misogynist (with his disrespectful comments about women like Rosie O’Donnell, Megyn Kelly, etc.), and he is very narcissistic. Trump talks about Greece and America in terms of debt, but he refused to advocate making the Wall Street banks accountable for their policies at all. He ignores the excessive power of Wall Street financiers over the U.S. polity, economy, and society.  Trump blamed the decline of the U.S. job market on other nations like China and Mexico while he mostly ignores Wall Street financiers who gave the order to ship jobs overseas. He doesn’t care that Mexican and Chinese workers are exploited and oppressed by vulture capitalist policies, but he believes in the American exceptional myth (that America is superior to every nation on Earth and we must be destined to lead the Earth in some messianic vision). Mexico and China didn’t ship jobs overseas, but Wall Street banks and other multinational corporations did. Trump is obsessed with austerity and deficit reduction. Trump wants to decrease the federal corporate income tax rate to 0% (in claiming that jobs would boom, which is false) when he doesn’t advocate a Wall Street sales tax. Trump supports eminent domain. Trump is a war monger advocating militarism against Iran, North Korea, etc. He wants corporations to take over Iraqi oil. That is why many progressive people want to tax Wall Street, demanding interest free public credit to build our national infrastructure, and create a policy for full employment. Henry Kravis is one person that Trump is considered to be the Treasury Secretary. Kravis have tons of establishment ties and his views on the 14th Amendment are extreme and obscene.  So, I don’t support Donald Trump, who disrespected the Central Park Five and he has been investigated by the government for discriminating against black people too. He is a person that is an extremist. The United States need to promote living wages, an end to imperialism, an end to the War on Drugs, the end to police brutality, the prosecution of police officers involved in extrajudicial murder of black people, a federal end to racial profiling, and other progressive solutions.


There is a huge amount of economic inequality and other racial discriminatory policies in New Orleans plus in other locations nationwide. There are sick people who are openly exploiting the situation to allow poor people and black people to suffer. The Lower Ninth Ward has not received adequately resources to rebuilt (it was the last region in the city to receive electricity, etc.) while the French Quarter and other areas are massively rebuilt. The Sanchez Center in the lower Ninth Ward was only opened in May of 2015. Today, there are 100,000 less African Americans living in New Orleans than in 2005. The storm was originally a national disaster. Later, it became a man-made disaster when many people suffering via neglect, negligence, and a disgraceful response by various governmental agencies. Classism and racism certainly are serious problems in New Orleans. I watched where one person said that people in the 9th Ward have to take buses in long distances to go into Walmart to just get groceries. Spike Lee has shown the truth. Also, Spike Lee has another documentary that deals with Katrina and the BP disaster on the Gulf Coast too. The BP disaster was about BP polluting waters, which harmed people and killed wildlife. I read that many of the FEMA locations had poisons in them too. The Bush/Cheney team was shopping, celebrating in a baseball game, etc. while people were dying in the streets of New Orleans. What made me angry was about how the cowardly racists were blaming the black people and the poor when they were victims of a natural disaster. Koch Industries being involved in corporate exploitation doesn't surprise me. The Koch Brothers were involved in aiding three strikes laws back during the 1990's. Malik Rahim, who is founder of Common Ground Relief, is one of the heroes of Katrina. There are many black Americans who love the term African American and love their black African identity. People have the right to call themselves what they want, but DNA doesn't lie. Black African Americans have every right to call themselves Africans if he or she wants too. I'm black and my DNA comes from Africa originally, so for me personally, I will always love my black African heritage. I have black African heritage.




There has been a huge amount of migrants coming into Europe. They come from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. They are escaping from the horrifying war zones going on as a product of the war on terror. The majority of the refugees want to escape violence unlashed on their homes and families by imperialist powers like America, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. The migrants have left from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, parts of Asia, and from various countries of East and West Africa. Many of these human beings have been smuggled into Europe. They encounter violence form the police and border guards. The smugglers are very violent ad many migrants died as a product of asphyxiation. Many dead refugees are found in cars, trucks, ships, and in other objects. During this year alone, there have been more than 300,000 people who already crossed the Mediterranean Sea.  This includes an estimated 180,000 making the short crossing from the Turkish mainland to Greek offshore islands, then trekking through Greece, Macedonia and Serbia to Hungary, and from there throughout the EU. The UN predicts this week that 3,000 migrants a day were passing through the Balkans by this land route (or an annual rate of more than one million people. The bulk of these human beings come from the civil war in Syria. The Civil War in Syria has been fermented by Washington and fueled by weapons supplied by U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey). There are many thousands of migrants traveling from Libya to Italy. Many ships have capped sized. The gruesome tragedy on the A4 motorway between Budapest and Vienna showed the deadly dangers of the supposedly safer land route for refugees. In an abandoned refrigerated truck lay 71 dead people, 59 men, eight women and four children; a girl who was not yet two years old, and three boys, ages between eight and ten years. An Austrian employee of the motorway company Asfinag discovered the parked truck on Thursday when attending a breakdown near Lake Neusiedl; decomposition fluids were already dripping from the vehicle. The police had the truck towed to a veterinary border service at Nickelsdorf on the Hungarian border, where police investigators retrieved the dead and examined the vehicle before the corpses were taken to the coroner’s office in Vienna. The death is apparently caused by asphyxiation. Human trafficking has made many traffickers rich with euros, which is wrong. For four years, the imperialists cited the killing of Syrians by the government of President Bashar al-Assad as the reason for a stepped-up campaign of subversion and violence to overthrow the Assad regime. Yet, when millions of Syrians flee the resulting killing field, they are demonized as "invaders" threatening the jobs and welfare of the European population, who must be deported or walled off. The 71 refugees who were found dead in Austria were likely from Syria, as a Syrian travel document was reportedly found among the bodies. This means that they had completed an arduous journey of 3,500 kilometers. We see growing militarism, the mistreatment of refugees, the erection of new barriers, and the further war on terror represent the contradictions of capitalism.

We will always remember Haiti. We see Western occupation of Haiti. Haiti deserves its own independence and self-determination. The U.S. Marines invaded and occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. This occupation involved the murder of Haitian peasants and the control of Haiti’s finances. The Haitian press was suppressing, Jim Crow views were shown there and the Haitian legislature was dissolved. Monroe Doctrine exceptionalism was promoted. They occupied Haiti again in 2004 when they overthrow the democratically elected government of Haiti (which was headed by Aristide). Aristide was kidnapped by the U.S. Marines and sent to a military base in the Central African Republic. Peter Hallward documented how the French and the American invasion force targeted and killed Aristide supporters and installed a puppet Prime Minister. Today, we see the United Nations installing MINUSTAH (or a military forced filled with even black and brown people) that brought a cholera epidemic, looting of mineral resources, rape, assassinations, etc. We have multinational corporations from the West exploiting Haiti and a criminally corrupt puppet regime. MINUSTAH is known as the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. This is a multibillion dollar military occupation. It has from 6,000 and 9,000 military troops and police with a few thousand civilian personnel. The current leader of Haiti is the puppet, neo-liberal Michel Martelly. Martelly opened up Haiti to further fleecing including its own gold and mineral resources. MINUSTAH is renewed each year by Martelly. MINUSTAH is known for oppressing the Haitian people via rape, assassination, and physical violence. They brought cholera into the country, which has killed more than 9,000 Haitians (and infected hundreds of thousands). The United Nations has immunity from prosecution despite being culpable in the deaths of Haitians. One disgrace is how there are black leaders involved in MINUSTAH (like Carl Alexandre and Sandra Honore) when that group MINUSTAH has been involved in overt war crimes. We know that these black leaders work for the agenda of racism/white supremacy.  In 1915, the sovereignty of the glorious Black Republic was harmed by American forces. Today, the sovereignty of Haiti has been harmed by evil people (who are white supremacists and even some black puppet leaders). We want independence, liberation, and self-determination for the nation of Haiti. Black people caused Haiti to be free in 1814 and we are in solidarity with the Haitian people today.

Chicago and culture goes hand in hand. There is so much culture in Chicago among different cultures that long books can be written on it. African Americans have a huge cultural history then and now in Chicago.  Between 1916 and 1920, almost 50,000 black Southerners moved into Chicago. This has influenced the city of Chicago with the growth of local churches, businesses, and community organizations. This also spread the musical culture with songs like jazz traveling form the Mississippi region (in the Delta) up into Chicago. During the Jazz (from the 1920’s to the 1940’s), nationally renowned musicians rose up in the Chicago world. Louis Armstrong and other jazz greats would headline in places like Dlelux Café (along the Stroll, which was a bright light district on State Street). To this very day, many jazz clubs are common in Chicago. Blues artists who played in Chicago include Muddy Water, Junior Wells, Sonny Boy Williamson. Jazz greats like Gene Ammons, Benny Goodman, Nat King Cole, etc. performed in Chicago all of the time. Gospel music is a strong staple of African American culture in Chicago. We can go down the list. Our parents and our grandparents know about the Staples Singers, Edwin Hawkins, James Cleveland, etc. Mahalia Jackson, Edwin Hawkins, Rev. Milton Brunson and the Thompson Community Singers all lived in or worked in Chicago. Curtis Mayfield, Lou Rawls, the Chi-lites, Rufus, Chaka Khan, R Kelly, Jennifer Hudson, Dave Hollister, Carl Thomas, etc. were/are great soul or R&B singers. Hip hop artists in Chicago include Common, Lupe Fiasco, Da Brat, Chief Keef, Shawnna, Twista, and you know Kanye West. There has been much public art that celebrate black culture in Chicago too. Alison Saar designed the Monument to the Great Migration in 2600 S. Martin Luther King Drive, which celebrates the thousands of African Americans who came into Chicago for the purpose of trying to have freedom and opportunity during the early 20th century. The monument shows a statue of a man with a suitcase, which represents his journey as the Great Migration is one of the greatest events in African American and American history. The Chicago Defender (which is a black media institution) successfully campaigned for the memorial to African American veterans of World War I to allow the Victory Monument to exist in Bronzeville. It was created by the French sculptor Leonard Crunelle with large granite columns with designs. It remembers the names of the 137 fallen soldiers of the Eighth Regiment of the Illinois National Guard. America’s first independent museum dedicated to the history of African and African American culture is the DuSable Museum. It’s found in 740 E. 56th St. It is one of Chicago’s greatest cultural institutions. It has more than 15,000 artifacts, priceless paintings, sculptures, and historical memorabilia. The South Side Community Art Center shows many art from paintings to sculptures as found in the South Side neighborhood of Chicago.

By Timothy