The Digital Dispatch

From NOEBIE.net

Brian K. Noe

No Time For Austerity

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A nasty strain of austerity capitalism has taken over Europe, leaving broken lives in its wake. Researchers Servaas Storm and C.W.M. Naastepad, senior lecturers in economics at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, consider how things got so bad, what role economists and misguided policy-makers have played, and how to change course. According to them, most everybody is getting the story about Europe dead wrong.

via How Parasitic Capitalism and Flawed Economics Turned Europe into the Hunger Games | Alternet.

From Posh to Poverty in SoMa

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Sylvia takes a walk South of Market in San Francisco.

“Under the freeway was a line of shopping carts ballooning with black plastic garbage bags. And on a dirt embankment across the street I saw shapes of people hanging out, talking and smoking in what seemed like a convivial atmosphere, much like a street fair. A few blocks north, the scene completely changed as new million-dollar condos popped up, and their denizens and designer pets strolled the glittery streets.”

Read the full essay: Berkeley Blog: Air-to-Earth Bnb: From Posh to Poverty in SF’s SoMa.

On American Soil

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The United States had Marxists in the past, it is true, but they were a strange type of Marxist, or rather, three strange types. In the first place, there were the émigrés cast out of Europe, who did what they could but could not find any response; in the second place, isolated American groups, like the De Leonists, who in the course of events, and because of their own mistakes, turned themselves into sects; in the third place, dilettantes attracted by the October Revolution and sympathetic to Marxism as an exotic teaching that had little to do with the United States. Their day is over. Now dawns the new epoch of an independent class movement of the proletariat and at the same time of genuine Marxism. In this, too, America will in a few jumps catch up with Europe and outdistance it. Advanced technology and an advanced social structure will pave their own way in the sphere of doctrine. The best theoreticians of Marxism will appear on American soil. Marx will become the mentor of the advanced American workers. To them this abridged exposition of the first volume will become only an initial step toward the complete Marx.

– Leon Trotsky

We Tortured People

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Today the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the Forward, Findings and Conclusions, and Executive Summary of their study on the Central Intelligence Agency’s “enhanced interrogation” program. Prior to its release, it has been a source of contention within the ruling class. The CIA actually was caught spying on the Senate Committee during the process of the investigation.

Here’s a link to the report.

Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program

For those who would like a three sentence summary, here it is.

We tortured people.

We lied about it.

The torture yielded no useful information.

The Assassination of Fred Hampton

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Today marks the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Fred Hampton by the Chicago Police. Five years ago, on the fortieth anniversary, Democracy Now aired a retrospective.

On December 4th, 1969, Chicago police raided Fred Hampton’s apartment, shot and killed him in his bed. He was just twenty-one years old. Black Panther leader Mark Clark was also killed in the raid.

While authorities claimed the Panthers had opened fire on the police who were there to serve a search warrant for weapons, evidence later emerged that told a very different story: that the FBI, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office and the Chicago police conspired to assassinate Fred Hampton. Noam Chomsky has called Hampton’s killing “the gravest domestic crime of the Nixon administration.”

See the full report: “The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther” | Democracy Now!.