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!
The next Labour government will turn this failed approach on its head with a Green Industrial Revolution to tackle the climate emergency, create hundreds of thousands of good green jobs in every region and nation of our country and save millions of households money on their bills. From the mass installation of solar panels, insulating homes, building the Swansea Tidal Lagoon, expanding solar and wind energy and bringing the National Grid into public ownership, Labour’s Green Industrial Revolution will benefit working-class people by cutting energy bills, creating good jobs in new, green industries and fighting the climate emergency,” he continued. “Social justice and climate justice are inseparable. Labour will tackle inequality and environmental destruction together. — Jeremy Corbyn Promises ‘Green Industrial Revolution’
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! The United States takes from the poor and gives to the Rich.
The Problem With Impeachment Impeaching Donald Trump would do nothing to halt the deep decay that has beset the American republic. It would not magically restore democratic institutions. It would not return us to the rule of law. It would not curb the predatory appetites of the big banks, the war industry and corporations. It would not get corporate money out of politics or end our system of legalized bribery. It would not halt the wholesale surveillance and monitoring of the public by the security services. It would not end the reigns of terror practiced by paramilitary police in impoverished neighborhoods or the mass incarceration of 2.3 million citizens. It would not impede ICE from hunting down the undocumented and ripping children from their arms to pen them in cages. It would not halt the extraction of fossil fuels and the looming ecocide. It would not give us a press freed from the corporate mandate to turn news into burlesque for profit. It would not end our endless and futile wars. It would not ameliorate the hatred between the nation’s warring tribes—indeed would only exacerbate these hatreds. By Chris Hedges
Income Inequality In America Is The Highest It’s Been Since Census Started Tracking It, Data Shows In The Midst Of The Nation’s Longest Economic Expansion, The Separation Between Rich And Poor Is At A Five-Decade High Income inequality in the United States has hit its highest level since the Census Bureau started tracking it more than five decades ago, according to data released Thursday, even as the nation’s poverty and unemployment rates are at historic lows. The gulf is starkest in wealthy regions along both coasts such as New York, Connecticut, California and Washington, D.C., as well as in areas with widespread poverty, such as Puerto Rico and Louisiana. Equality was highest in Utah, Alaska and Iowa.
The US military protects Big Oil and other extractive industries.. We can’t get off the fossil fuel treadmill until we stop our military from acting as the world’s protector of Big Oil.
The Pentagon is the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world.
The Pentagon monopolizes the funding we need to seriously address the climate crisis.of the 2019 military budget of $716 billion would beenough to fund 128,879 green infrastructure jobs instead.
Military operations leave a toxic legacy in their wake.$11.5 billion on environmental cleanup of closed bases and estimates $3.4 billion more will be needed.
Wars ravage fragile ecosystems that are crucial to sustaining human health and climate resiliency.
Climate change is a “threat multiplier” that makes already dangerous social and political situations even worse.
US sabotages international agreements addressing climate change and war.
Mass migration is fueled by both climate change and conflict, with migrants often facing militarized repression.
Militarized state violence is leveled against communities resisting corporate-led environmental destruction.
Climate change and nuclear war are both existential threats to the planet.
We Must Have a Green Industrial Revolution. And Labour Will Lead It I remember thinking: if this is how far we’ve come in 200 years, what’s the future going to look like? But the future is no longer such a rosy place, as those who saw David Attenborough’s Climate Change: The Facts earlier this month will have realised. If you see a scientist on TV these days, they’re probably talking about the perilous state of our climate and the threat to our planet’s living systems. From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the Met Office to Nasa, some of the greatest minds of our generation are modelling the future, and their conclusions are stark. By Rebecca Long-Bailey
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Labor:
The Has Been No Recovery For the Working Class!
From The Condition of the United States Working Class — Where Do We Go From Here?: When I was a union official, I called this system labors’ rush to the bottom! The Graph Below is a Graphic Example of the Decline in Standard of Living of the Working Class, Since the Trade Union Bureaucracy Declared Itself to Be ‘In a (Domestic) Partnership With the Boss’(Class Cooperation)! Through the 1980s and 1990s they even included this ‘partnership’ into their work agreements and the partnership was fully established! Starting in the mid-1980s, This ‘partnership’ gave birth to the one, two, three, three, ect. wage tier system! Selling out the futures of future young workers entering the labor force. And, since the lowest union wage is immediately the highest non-union wage, this wage tier system cut the wages of the entire working class! When I was a union official, I called this system labors rush to the bottom! As in graphically shown in this: Shadow Government Statistics Graph. At the same time, Real Wages have Fallen Since the Wage Price Freeze of 1972 (Shadow Government Statistics): Graph 3 plots the seasonally-adjusted earnings as officially deflated by the BLS (red-line), and as adjusted for the ShadowStats-Alternate CPI Measure, 1990-Base (blue-line). When inflation-depressing methodologies of the 1990s began to kick-in, the artificially-weakened CPI-W (also used in calculating Social Security cost-of-living adjustments) helped to prop up the reported real earnings. Official real earnings today still have not recovered their inflation-adjusted levels of the early-1970s, and, at best, have been in a minimal uptrend for the last two decades (albeit spiked recently by negative headline inflation). Deflated by the ShadowStats (1990-Based) measure, real earnings have been in fairly-regular decline for the last four decades, which is much closer to common experience than the pattern suggested by the CPI-W. See the Public Commentary on Inflation Measurement for further detail. This process has led to a greater productivity and windfall profits for the capitalist, without more value being added to society.
Bureaucrats Treat the Rank&File Like Mushrooms. — They Keep Them In The Dark And Feed Them Bullshit!: UAW Keeping Workers In The Dark As It Works To Shut Down Strike Against GM With the strike by 48,000 General Motors workers in the US entering its 11th day, the United Auto Workers is continuing to keep striking workers in the dark by refusing to reveal the content of its “negotiations” with GM. The nationwide walkout is the longest in the auto industry since the 21-day Ford strike in 1976 and the 67-day walkout at GM in 1970. It is part of a global eruption of class struggle, including the resumption of strikes by autoworkers in Korea yesterday. In perfunctory letter to GM workers released Tuesday, UAW Vice President Terry Dittes said, “All unsettled proposals are now at the Main Table and have been presented to General Motors, and we are awaiting their response. This back and forth will continue until negotiations are complete.” The letter did not say what the content of the “back and forth” is. From the start of official “negotiations” in mid-July, the UAW has not revealed any of the details of its demands. That’s because they don’t have any. Like every other contract over the last 40 years, the terms have been set by corporate management, with discussion centered on how to force workers to accept a new round of concessions. By Jerry White
Under Pressure From Labor Leaders and Striking Workers, GM Agrees to Fund Health Coverage During Walkout Workers’ rights supporters celebrated Thursday after General Motors caved to pressure and agreed to continue paying healthcare premiums for thousands of striking workers. The company moved to fund its employees’ benefits after its earlier announcement that United Auto Workers (UAW) would have to fund workers’ healthcare during the strike was met with scorn from labor leaders and lawmakers. By Julia ConleyGM Restores Health Care to Strikers in Maneuver to Smooth Path For UAW Sellout GM announced that it would restore shut-off healthcare benefits to 48,000 striking workers in the United States in an effort to smooth the way for the United Auto Workers union to end the strike and impose the company’s dictates. The company cut off healthcare shortly after the strike began on September 16, after the United Auto Workers had assured workers that it had reached an agreement for GM to continue coverage through the end of the month. By Tom Hall
Economy:
The Fed Is Offering $100 Billion a Day in Emergency Loans to Unnamed Banks and Congress Is Not Curious Enough to Hold a Hearing The Federal Reserve Bank of New York first initiated its emergency overnight loans to Wall Street this year on Tuesday, September 17, starting off at the rate of $75 billion daily. It then increased its loans by adding, in addition to the $75 billion daily, 14-day term loans in the amount of $30 billion to be offered three times this past week. But after the demand for the first 14-day loan was more than double the $30 billion offered, the New York Fed boosted the next term loans to $60 billion and increased its overnight loans to $100 billion. What will next week bring? When Wall Street can get super cheap loans from the Fed in the tens of billions of dollars with no questions asked by Congress, it will continue upping its demands until the Fed is once again secretly shelling out trillions of dollars while Congress willfully remains in the dark – in other words, a replay of the 2007-2010 financial crisis. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
New York Fed Headquarters Building in Lower Manhattan
World:
Demonstrators in Lima Protest Against Water Privatization “Water is a right, not a privilege” protesters in Peru’s capital chanted throughout the city’s main avenues Thursday, claiming their human right to have access to the natural resource. Residents of Lima, Peru, marched against the privatization of the pubic Lima Drinking Water and Sewerage Service (Sedapal) Thursday as they headed towards the Ministry of Housing Construction and Sanitation.Saudi Crown Prince Takes Responsibility for Khashoggi Murder “It happened under my watch. I get all the responsibility, because it happened under my watch.” Saudi Arabia’s crown prince said he bears responsibility for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year by Saudi operatives “because it happened under my watch,” according to a PBS documentary to be broadcast next week. It is the first time that Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, has publicly indicated personal accountability for the killing inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by operatives seen as close to him. The CIA and some Western governments have said they believe he ordered it, but Saudi officials say he had no role.
Health, Education, and Welfare:
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!
How The Credit Card Usury/Loan Shark Interest Rates Became Legal:
Have you ever noticed that all your credit card bills seem to get mailed to South Dakota, Nevada or Delaware? Have you ever wondered why national credit card issuers would want to run their businesses in South Dakota, a state where the average temperature in January is 5 degrees? More importantly, have you wondered why credit card companies can ignore your state’s usury law, which limits the amount of interest that can be charged on a loan, and charge whatever rate they want? . . . The answer lies in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling, Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis vs. First of Omaha Service Corp. The case not only changed the law, but also became a light-bulb moment for the industry, setting it on a 30-year path that deeply affected state economies and Americans’ debt levels. “There have been a few seminal events in the industry; this was one of them,” says Scott Crawford, a former analyst in the Congressional Budget Office and for credit card issuer HSBC. He is now CEO of DebtGoal.com. “There was a premium for being in states with lax usury laws. It gave you a strong advantage over operators in other states.” The ruling provided a transitionary moment for both the banking industry and a handful of entrepreneurial states — most notably South Dakota and Delaware. The states saw an opportunity to dramatically expand their job bases during a deep recession by luring credit card companies to relocate into their borders. The ruling let credit card issuers “export” nationally whatever interest rate was allowed in the state in which they were headquartered. To induce the companies to relocate, some states simply dropped their usury laws. Several large issuers bit on the deal, relocated and it became anything goes for credit card rates. — How A Supreme Court Ruling Killed Off Usury Laws For Credit Card Rates
Quotes of the Day:
10 Ways that the Climate Crisis and Militarism are Intertwined By Medea Benjamin
GM Restores Health Care to Strikers in Maneuver to Smooth Path For UAW Sellout GM announced that it would restore shut-off healthcare benefits to 48,000 striking workers in the United States in an effort to smooth the way for the United Auto Workers union to end the strike and impose the company’s dictates. The company cut off healthcare shortly after the strike began on September 16, after the United Auto Workers had assured workers that it had reached an agreement for GM to continue coverage through the end of the month. By Tom Hall
