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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 Who Profit From Austerity! Under Austerity, All of the World Will Eventually Be Pauperized, Humbled, and Desecrated Like Greece and Puerto Rico
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Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, as we continue with Part 2 of our interview with the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter James Risen, who left The New York Times in August to join The Intercept as senior national security correspondent, and, this week, published a 15,000-word story headlined “The Biggest Secret: My Life as a New York Times Reporter in the Shadow of the War on Terror.” In the story, Jim Risen gives a personal account of his struggles to publish significant stories involving national security in the post-9/11 period and how both the government and the top Times editors suppressed his reporting on stories, including the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, for which he ultimately would win The New York Times a Pulitzer Prize in 2006. He describes how his story would have come out right before the 2004 presidential election of President Bush over John Kerry, potentially changing the outcome of that election. But, under government pressure, the Times caved, refused to publish the story for more than a year, until Jim Risen was publishing a book that would have the revelations in it. In this new piece for The Intercept, James Risen also describes meetings between top Times editors and officials at the CIA and the White House. Risen was not only pursued by the Bush administration, but by the Obama administration, as well, Eric Holder, attorney general, as part of a six-year leak investigation into his book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. His refusal to name a source would take him to the Supreme Court. He almost wound up in jail, until the Obama administration blinked. His answer to that saga was to write another book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. — Amy Goodman
Videos
Trump Administration Proposes Opening 90% Of US Waters To Offshore Drilling The proposal has already received a lot of pushback from both sides of the aisle. Mitch Jones of Food & Water Watch says there’s still time to harness that widespread opposition and stop the expansion of extreme energy extraction before the policy change can take effect
Is Trump’s Wall Possible? President Trump is saying that he will only support legislation for children immigrants (DACA) if Democrats agree to support $13 billion for a fortified border wall. Leaving aside the usefulness and policy implications of such a wall, what are its logistics? We replay an analysis from March 2016
U.S.:
When it comes to the Iran protests, be careful who you put your trust in A vacuum of information is created which, at a moment of intense international interest, is going to be filled with dubious stories from partisan sources The international media has a poor record in reporting protests and uprisings in the wider Middle East since 2011. These complex struggles were presented as simple battles between good and evil, like a scene out of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Surprise and anguish were expressed when the supposed dawning of freedom and democracy in Libya, Syria and Yemen instead produced savage civil wars while Egypt and Bahrain became strikingly more authoritarian and repressive than before. Whatever the causes of the failure of news organisations to understand developments in these countries, they had clearly got something very wrong about what was happening. By Patrick Cockburn
Mapping a World From Hell: 76 Countries are Now Involved in Washington’s War on Terror He left Air Force Two behind and, unannounced, “shrouded in secrecy,” flew on an unmarked C-17 transport plane into Bagram Air Base, the largest American garrison in Afghanistan. All news of his visit was embargoed until an hour before he was to depart the country. More than 16 years after an American invasion “liberated” Afghanistan, he was there to offer some good news to a U.S. troop contingent once again on the rise. Before a 40-foot American flag, addressing 500 American troops, Vice President Mike Pence praised them as “the world’s greatest force for good,” boasted that American air strikes had recently been “dramatically increased,” swore that their country was “here to stay,” and insisted that “victory is closer than ever before.” As an observer noted, however, the response of his audience was “subdued.” (“Several troops stood with their arms crossed or their hands folded behind their backs and listened, but did not applaud.”) by Tom Engelhardt
Tax Cuts as a Route to Cutting Social Security Conservatives are fond of saying that if you give a man a fish you can feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish you can feed him for a lifetime. This is supposed to tell us that social benefits, such as government programs, are bad for people. A much better example of conservative thought would be to say if I put a fence at the entrance to the pier and don’t let anyone else have access to the water, I can have all the fish for myself. Let those peasants starve! Such a privatization of fish isn’t distant from the actual mechanics of class warfare as it is practiced, unfortunately. by Pete Dolack
Will Trump Use “Human Rights” to Kill the Iran Nukes Deal? In a matter of days, Donald Trump will have the chance to scuttle the Iranian Nuclear agreement, a transaction that Trump has called “the worst deal ever.” The future of the so called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA depends largely on whether Trump opts to reimpose economic sanctions on Iran or not. If the president does in fact reimpose sanctions, (sometime after January 13) the United States will be in “material noncompliance” with the terms of the nuclear agreement and all bets will be off. That means there are two questions that readers should be asking themselves: by Mike Whitney 
Mexico’s Standing Rock? Since Mexico privatized its oil and gas resources in 2013, border-crossing pipelines including those owned by Sempra Energy and TransCanada have come under intense scrutiny and legal challenges, particularly from Indigenous peoples.Opening up the spigot for U.S. companies to sell oil and gas into Mexico was a top priority for the Obama State Department under Hillary Clinton.by Steve Horn
Environment:
Concerned Citizens in Cancer Alley Vow to Ramp up Battle Against Industrial Pollution in 2018 This past year in Louisiana’s St. John the Baptist Parish, a small group of residents began organizing their community to compel the state to protect them against an invisible menace: the air they breathe. Their parish, the Louisiana equivalent of a county, is situated in what’s known as Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that hosts more than 100 petrochemical factories. At the helm of the battle is the Concerned Citizens of St. John, a diverse group of parish residents pushing back against the area’s historically bad — and worsening — industrial pollution. “One thing we all have in common is a desire for clean air,” the group’s founder, Robert Taylor, told me. Next year, the burgeoning group plans to get political and broaden its reach by banding together with similar groups in the region. By Julie Dermansky
New Study: Big Ag, Climate Crisis Key Drivers of Ocean ‘Dead Zones’ Quadrupling in Size Over Last 60 Years “These findings are no surprise, and further confirm that the unchecked pollution from industrial agriculture has reached crisis levels and requires immediate action.” Environmental protection advocates called for urgent action on Thursday after a report published in Science detailed a huge rise in low-oxygen “dead zones” within the planet’s oceans. The increased use of chemical fertilizers by the industrial agriculture sector over the past several decades , the study warns, has prompted large-scale run-off of sewage and other byproducts entering ocean waters, causing deoxygenated dead zones to quadruple in size since 1950—now covering an area roughly the size of the European Union. By Julia Conley
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Trump’s Offshore Oil Drilling Plans Ignore the Lessons of BP Deepwater Horizon Spill The Trump administration is proposing to ease regulations that were adopted to make offshore oil and gas drilling operations safer after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. This event was the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Eleven workers died in the explosion and sinking of the oil rig, and more than 4 million barrels of oil were released into the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists have estimated that the spill caused more than US$17 billion in damages to natural resources. By Donald Boesch
Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:
Tears and Struggle: From Erica Garner to Ahed Tamimi In many respects, 2017 was a miserable year for just about everyone but the one percent and the parasitic elites who serve its interests. Suffering, dislocation, and insecurity plagued large swaths of the planet. In the United States, Trump’s dystopian agenda deepened the economic pain of millions. Meanwhile the billionaire class extended its hegemony, dramatically expanding the landscape of social anguish. As the corrosion of democracy accelerated, a dark pall enveloped the ranks of the opposition. Leftists and progressives continued to mobilize across the country. Yet as they scrambled to respond to the political onslaught, many people of conscience slipped into survival mode, devoting to rearguard skirmishes the energy needed to actually build a world beyond imperialism, oligarchy, and bigotry. by Russell Rickford
Labor:
Economy:
2018 World Inequality Report Shows an Economic Ship Blown Way Off Course Income inequality has become one of the biggest political talking points of our age — and for good reason. The new World Inequality Report 2018, by Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez along with collaborators Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, reviews the recent distribution of gains in wealth among various income brackets. Little surprise to most, their research shows that over the past few decades the majority of income gains have gone to the top 1%, not to the middle class. Saez and his colleagues’ findings couldn’t have been published at a more appropriate time. As the 2017 legislative session closed, House and Senate lawmakers passed the most sweeping tax reform package since the Reagan years. Mainstream analysts and critics of the proposal say that under the GOP plan, the vast majority of benefits will go to corporations and the wealthiest. The fact is, only the corporate tax breaks are permanent; by 2025, the middle class, by comparison, will be paying vastly more in taxes than they already do today.By Kate Harveston, Occupy.com
World:
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
It’s Time to Confront the Scourge of Advertising in the Capitalist Food System While it’s customary to blame consumer companies and their advertising campaigns for predatory and manipulative messages, it’s time to look beyond that critique to the truly deadly ingredient in the mix: capitalism itself. After all, the proliferation of lifestyle diseases is a direct result of lifestyle advertising promoted and subsidized under our capitalist system. By Justin Theodra
