During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three Point Political Program: Austerity, Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and 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 1% Who Profit From Austerity! Under Austerity, All of the World Will Eventually Be Pauperized, Humbled, and Desecrated Like Greece and Puerto Rico. Socialism Means True Democracy — The 99% Will Rule! — Not the Few!
Images of the Day:
U.S. Interest Payments to Equal Social Security Spending by 2048: CBO (But Every Year, Social Security Uses it Trust Funds to Buy US Savings Bonds. So the Principal and the Amount of Interest Due to Social Security Keeps Expanding and So the Debt Owed, in Interest to Social Security Keeps Expanding the Debt Bubble)
Speaking About the New Federal Budget and National Debt Increase. Almost All Major Newscasters Newspeak That There Is A Social Security Debt Crisis — Setting The Stage For Impending Cuts In Social Security Benefits.:
The Myth: Both of those, Medicare and Social Security, on trend to double or nearly double. And they are already one of the largest spending amounts, Judy. And if you look at this, Medicare, Judy, right now, it is on track to run through its trust fund in seven years. So, if lawmakers don’t deal with this, benefits will be cut. — PBS Newhour, The Long-Term Debt Mplications of Senate’s New 2-Year Budget
The Facts:The bottom line is that Social Security is more financially sound today than it has been throughout most of its 69-year history, according to Social Security trustees’ numbers. If workers in 2050, who will be earning on average 68 percent more in real, inflation-adjusted dollars than they are today, have to pay 1 or 2 percent more of their income in taxes—as they have in the past—they won’t be able to complain much. They will still enjoy higher living standards than we do today. And Social Security will provide much larger real annual benefits for longer retirements when their turn comes. The impending crisis of Social Security is a myth. Without it, however, Bush’s initiative to slash benefits and partially privatize the program wouldn’t have a prayer. — Mark Weisbrot and Dean Baker What Crisis? It Ain’t Broke, So No Need To Fix It
The Bailing Out of Wall Street:
The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression… The Fed outsourced virtually all of the operations of their emergency lending programs to private contractors like JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. The same firms also received trillions of dollars in Fed loans at near-zero interest rates. Altogether some two-thirds of the contracts that the Fed awarded to manage its emergency lending programs were no-bid contracts. Morgan Stanley was given the largest no-bid contract worth $108.4 million to help manage the Fed bailout of AIG. — Bernie Sanders, Bernie, It’s Time to Audit the New York Fed
Videos of the Day:
Negative Interest, Debt Jubilee?As interest rates head into negative territory and Greek debt yields less than US Treasury debt, DOUBLE DOWN asks economist and historian, Dr. Michael Hudson if any economic theory has ever suggested negative interest rates. Not since back to the Bronze Age does he recall anything like this being suggested. That’s because, for thousands of years, economic beings have chosen to hold debt jubilees. Negative rates achieve that a bit slower but they do the same thing eventually by bringing the volume of savings on the asset side of the balance sheet down to the volume of debt that can be repaid. Hudson believes rates will quickly go as negative as 25% …
The United States is not a Democracy (A government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly)! Only the 1%, through their ownership of the Republicrats and who profit from war and the war budget, vote for War and the war budget — A policy, which Gore Vidal called a Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.— The 99% Should Decide On War — Not Just The 1% Who Profit From War! Under a Democracy, The 99% would have the right to vote on the policy of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace!
For one, they are driven by sane powerful economic forces, gainfully employed in afflicting a vulnerable population. The rapacious, unregulated capitalism of the kind that now shapes the Trump agenda prepared the ground of the opioid crisis in Appalachia, the Midwest Rust Belt, and elsewhere by engendering the inequalities and hardships that drive so many to despair.— The Opioid and Trump Addictions: Symptoms of the Same Malaise
As the Prisons Grow — From the New Jim Crow to the New Slavery: America Has Gulags in Its Own BackyardPlucking chickens for for-profit companies, caring for elderly patients without any training, and other forms of hard, uncompensated labor are sanctioned in the United States as court-mandated rehabilitation for drug-related charges. As the deficit of rehab care in the U.S. grew during the far-reaching opioids crisis over recent years, what are essentially work camps—where detainees work for no money or face prison time, despite often not even being convicted of a crime—started to pop up all over the country. In a hard-hitting series for Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, investigative journalist Shoshana Walter details the shocking discoveries she and her former Reveal colleague Amy Julia Harris, now at The New York Times, made as they investigated long-term residential treatment programs in which recovering addicts worked for such employers as Exxon, Shell and Walmart—and received no pay. By Robert Scheer‘We Cannot Keep Handing Over Billions to Military-Industrial Complex,’ Says Sanders as Senate Passes Massive Pentagon Budget“The Pentagon is set to grow by $90 billion and reach $738 billion next year. For $90 billion, we could double nutrition assistance or provide $7,000 to every child in poverty.” By Jake Johnson
Those ‘rat infested’ places in Baltimore? They’re owned by Trump’s son-in-law Davon Jones doesn’t have to look far to see the irony in President Donald Trump’s tweets that Baltimore is a “rat and rodent infested mess.” His apartment owned by the president’s son-in-law has been invaded by mice since he moved in a year ago. “I don’t know how they come in,” Jones says. “Every time I catch them, they come right back.” Jared Kushner’s family real estate firm owns thousands of apartments and townhomes in the Baltimore area, and some have been criticized for the same kind of disrepair and neglect that the president has accused local leaders of failing to address. Residents have complained about mold, bedbugs, leaks and, yes, mice — plenty of mice. And they say management appears in no hurry to fix the problems.Environment:
Reparations Rising – With Permission from White Democrats Black people are not obligated to defend opportunists and servants of white capital in Baltimore just because they were called out by Trump. By Glen Ford, BAR executive editorFreedom Rider: Trump and Baltimore Anyone feeling the need to defend Baltimore from Trump’s opinions ought to talk about what really ails that city. By Margaret Kimberley, BAR editor and senior columnistTrump and Black Misleadership Class: Collaborators in the Defense of White Power Black people are not obligated to defend opportunists and servants of white capital in Baltimore just because they were called out by Trump. By Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnistRussiagate Fanatic Michael Isikoff’s Curious Project Seymour Hersh has been right about some of the biggest stories of our times, and he thinks the DNC email theft was an inside job. By Ann Garrison , BAR contributor Megan Rapinoe: Fake Progressive The con of diversity is all that distinguishes Democratic Party elites and white feminists from the big Orange Menace in the White House. By Danny Haiphong , BAR contributorBad Hombre Defense By Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residenceWait!
Call the Cream Team—
Dershbag’s a lawyer,
Slick Willy’s a lawyer—
Wait!
Before you suicide the accused
Serial pedophile predator
who could flip and name names,
Before he has a heart attack, or
viagra overdose Before he hangs himself with
dental floss; or a garbage bag
There’s the Bad Hombre Defense:
He’s rich, he can have any woman
he wants! Why would he fool with
teenage trailer trash? Why? Why? . . .
Black Agenda Radio for Week of July 29, 2019 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.
US Was Model for South African Apartheid The US acted as midwife to South Africa’s apartheid system, said Gerald Horne, author of “US Imperialism and Anti-Communism vs. Liberation of Southern Africa, from Rhodes to Mandela.” Horne, a professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston and possibly Black America’s most prolific living political writer, said the US Carnegie Corporation formulated “the blueprint” for South Africa’s apartheid system, imposed in 1948 as “a combination of neo-slavery and Jim Crow on steroids.”
Mumia Book Supplants Howard Zinn “Mumia has decided to go to the next level and replace Howard Zinn,” the revered author of “A People’s History of the United States,” said Todd Steven Burroughs, an author and biographer of Mumia Abu Jamal, at a roundtable discussion of Abu Jamal and Stephen Vittoria three-part book, “Murder Incrporated,” at Newark, New Jersey’s Source of Knowledge bookstore. Mumia and VIttoria bring a “decolonized perspective” to US history, said Burroughs. On Prison Radio, Abu Jamal said voters should reject Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy because of his support for the 1990s Crime Bill, a bankruptcy act that enslaved students to college debt, and the Iraq war.
Mackler Running Against War “If we’re going to change anything in the word,” said Socialist Action Party presidential candidate Jeff Mackler, “we need to build a massive, united social movement that challenges the inherent prerogatives, interventions and wars of capitalism.”
Labor:
Economy:
Shadow Government Statistics Alternate Unemployment Charts The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers. The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment. The ShadowStats Alternate Unemployment Rate for July 2019 is 21.0%.
Bernie, It’s Time to Audit the New York Fed On July 21, 2011 the investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), released the first-ever government audit of the Federal Reserve in its 98-year history. The audit came about as a result of the determined efforts of Senator Bernie Sanders to force transparency on the secretive Wall Street bailout actions of the Federal Reserve during the 2008 financial crash and the years that followed. Sanders successfully tacked an amendment on the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 that mandated a top-to-bottom audit of how much the Fed had spent on its bailout and the financial institutions to whom it went. By Pam Martens and Russ MartensWorld:
UN Report on Child Casualties Blacklists only Muslim Perpetrators Secretary General Antionio Guterres presented the report on child casualties in war to the Security Council on Friday. Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen are the areas with the highest numbers of child casualties, followed by Palestine. Nearly all the children killed were Muslim
The government of the United States can pass laws in a few days to spend tens of trillions of dollars for war and the bailout of Wall Street and the bankers. Yet, those who ‘govern’, pass universal healthcare for themselves, but they cannot spend even one trillion dollars for universal health for those who are ‘governed’! This is what is considered, by the powers the to be, a democracy and part of the democratic way. — Roland Sheppard, Let The People Vote on Healthcare!
‘We Cannot Keep Handing Over Billions to Military-Industrial Complex,’ Says Sanders as Senate Passes Massive Pentagon Budget“The Pentagon is set to grow by $90 billion and reach $738 billion next year. For $90 billion, we could double nutrition assistance or provide $7,000 to every child in poverty.” By Jake Johnson
Environment:
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Reparations Rising – With Permission from White Democrats Black people are not obligated to defend opportunists and servants of
white capital in Baltimore just because they were called out by Trump. By Glen Ford, BAR executive editor
Freedom Rider: Trump and Baltimore
Anyone feeling the need to defend Baltimore from Trump’s opinions ought to talk about what really ails that city. By Margaret Kimberley, BAR editor and senior columnist
Trump and Black Misleadership Class: Collaborators in the Defense of White Power Black people are not obligated to defend opportunists and servants of
white capital in Baltimore just because they were called out by Trump. By Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
Russiagate Fanatic Michael Isikoff’s Curious Project Seymour Hersh has been right about some of the biggest stories of our times, and he thinks the DNC email theft was an inside job. By Ann Garrison , BAR contributor 
Megan Rapinoe: Fake Progressive The con of diversity is all that distinguishes Democratic Party elites and white feminists from the big Orange Menace in the White House. By Danny Haiphong , BAR contributor
Bad Hombre Defense By Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
Wait!
A Legacy of Violence and Land Appropriation Bethesda Moses African Cemetery Montgomery County officials thought no one would care about a “bunch of dead black folks.” By BAR Editor and Columnist, Dr. Marsha Adebayo and Chris Rigaux
Markets and Margins: An interview with Etant Dupain The Haitian market woman has been marginalized by the same forces that oppress and prey on her nation. By The Public Archive 
Black Agenda Radio for Week of July 29, 2019 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.
World:
Health, Education, and Welfare: