During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three Point Political Program: Austerity, Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and The Iron Heel.
The Capitalist Austerity Program = It’s Become the Race to the Botom! The Pauperization of the 99%!
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 Lies of Capitalism Neoliberals love to quote the World Bank’s rosy statistics about capitalism lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. Unfortunately, those statistics are skewed and manipulated to the point of outright prevarication, as Seth Donnelly demonstrates in his new book, “The Lie of Global Prosperity.” He quotes a breathless World Bank press release, “soon 90 percent of the world’s population will live on $1.90 a day or more.” No matter that translated into local currency at local prices, in many places that $1.90 per day purchases the equivalent of 30 cents a day or that $1.90 per day means the pauperization of billions – for as Donnelly shows, a truer metric of avoiding desperate poverty is over $5 per day. If that far more honest measure is applied, 80 percent of South Asians and sub-Saharan Africans are, Donnelly explains, horribly impoverished. Even more disturbing, achieving a 70-year life expectancy requires $7.40 a day, something the world’s cold and pampered capitalists will certainly not shell out or even allow for the billions of wretchedly poor. By Eve Ottenberg
‘Drill Baby Drill’ — Capitalism’s Greed and Wanton Disregard For Life, Liberty and The Pursuit of Happiness.: As Reutersreported, the BLM “has not held a lease sale in California since 2013, when a judge ruled that the agency illegally issued leases without analyzing the environmental impact of drilling called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.” Clare Lakewood, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that sued BLM to stop the lease sales, said the agency’s “reckless move” on Friday represents “the toxic convergence of Trump’s climate denial, loyalty to the oil industry, and grudge against California.” — Merging ‘Loyalty to the Oil Industry’ and ‘Grudge Against California,’ Trump Opens 725,000 Acres to Fossil Fuel Drilling
Sticking to a basic script for leaders of both major parties, Pelosi has vehemently denied the systematic violations of the Fourth Amendment that Snowden exposed. Such denial is routine, while sometimes going over-the-top to blame the messenger for the accurate news. “Edward Snowden is a coward,” the Obama administration’s top diplomat, Secretary of State John Kerry, said in a TV interview one year after Snowden’s revelations. “He is a traitor. And he has betrayed his country. — Pelosi Wants to Prosecute Snowden But Protect Trump Whistleblower
Videos Of the Day:
U.S.:
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 Media Monopoly Keeps Consolidating: Wall Street Is Killing Local Newspapers Though lacking the size and prestige of The New York Times or The Washington Post, The Storm Lake Times is arguably just as important. Two years ago, the small, bi-weekly Iowa paper (circulation: 3,000) won the coveted Pulitzer Prize for taking on agricultural water pollution in the state. If it weren’t for vibrant local papers, stories like these might never come to light. Unfortunately, all over the country, private equity and hedge funds have been scooping up these cash-strapped papers — and looting them into irrelevance or bankruptcy. Here’s how it works. Investors put down a fraction of the purchase price and borrow the rest — and then saddle the company with that debt. Layoffs and cutbacks follow, which leads to a shabbier product. Circulation and revenue decline, then more cuts, and the cycle accelerates. Eventually the paper is a shadow of its former self, or turned to ashes completely. Wall Street wins, the public loses. By Olivia Snow SmithHow the U.S. Military Undermines the American Economy Now, nearly six decades later, Eisenhower’s warning has become institutionalized. Military spending not only strongly influences, if not shapes, corporate capitalism but might well pose a threat to the future of the nation’s economic development. Eisenhower surly must be spinning in grave given how much influence the military industrial complex wields today. In 1960, the military budget stood at $344 billion; today, the military complex, including the ever-growing intelligence apparatus, cost taxpayers over $1 trillion. Military spending for the period October 1, 2019, through September 30, 2020, is at $989 billion and covers the Dept. of Defense, veterans’ benefits, international military assistance, nuclear weapons spending and military intelligence. By David RosenThe United States of Bribery and Sanctioning The democratrepublicans are now confidently toying with the idea that Trump could be impeached because there seems to be a possibility that Trump tried to use some of the US’ institutionalized, bipartisanly supported bribery of a foreign government to try to insure his own political advantage. The entrapment into privately profitable insurance ventures through the use of bribes and sanctions has long been widely and very highly regarded in Washington. By Clark T. Scott
We Meddle Too: Trump, Empire, and “The National Interest” Never underestimate the power of the United States’ American Exeptionalist and imperial doctrine. Look at the recent Washington Post revelation regarding wannabe fascist strongman Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian ambassador Sergey Lavrov in the White House in 2017. Trump told Lavrov and another high-ranking Russian official that he wasn’t concerned about Russia meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because the United States does the same thing in other countries. By Paul StreetEnvironment:
England Applies The Iron Heel!: ‘Not What Democracy Looks Like’: Outrage as UK Police Use Battering Ram to Raid Extinction Rebellion Building “These tactics are very questionable and are arguably infringing on our rights to peaceful protest, and indeed our efforts to preserve people’s right to life.” London police on Saturday raided a building Extinction Rebellion activists were using to store supplies ahead of a climate demonstration planned for Monday, a preemptive action environmentalists condemned as an unlawful crackdown on a peaceful protesters. By Jake Johnson
Our Global Gas Chamber One of the great (mostly) untold stories of the Age Of Oil is the array of toxic chemicals in hydrocarbon exhaust and the accumulation of exhaust-borne particulates in the bloodstream and brain. We are largely indifferent to these byproducts of our industrial-grade obsession with hydrocarbons, but our willful ignorance cannot hide the facts the way catalytic converters hide the odors they produce.
A particularly daunting informational pdffrom the State of New Hampshire details the chemical miasma we find ourselves in:
Gasoline emitsethanol, benzene, toluene, xylene and toxic air pollutants (TAPs) such as formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, 1,3-butadiene, diesel particulate matter, acrolein, cadmium, chromium, and lead.
Diesel engines emitunburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, NOx, sulfur oxides, PM, black carbon, VOCs and carbon dioxide.
Lawn and garden equipment emit carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, VOCs, NOx. Factsheet ARD-22: Lawn and Garden Equipment
Additionally, the Google summary for the pdf notes that:
Natural gas emitscarbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides.
We are pumping megatons of this crap into the air that we breathe. It is also the air that the disappearing birds and dying insects depend upon. In fact, I was thinking about this intersection on Saturday when I was tending to the familial fig tree … and realized there weren’t any birds around. By Jp Sottile
Millions of Years of Low CO2 … Until NowIn Facing the Anthropocene, I showed that CO2 levels are higher than they have been for 800,000 years. New research extends that to 2.6 million yearsEarth System scientists describe the Anthropocene as a “no-analog state,” a time when conditions on Earth have changed in unprecedented ways. A new study confirms and extends that conclusion, showing not only that humans have never before experienced carbon dioxide levels this high, but that our ancestors didn’t either.The Battles Now One real battle we are in now – human caused global warming – is a battle we realized very belatedly we are in. The other – the political one – is, in a President Trump retweet, heading toward “a Civil War like fracture in this nation” and is a Mad Hatter sort of battle in which both sides see the other through a shattered looking glass, and hear each other through a madhouse Twitter echo chamber. The battle in which we are fighting for survival on this planet is a battle with ourselves, though the economics we have constructed now seems to lie outside ourselves as an unimpeachable reality. By Joseph Natoli
Biosolids: Mix Human Waste With Toxic Chemicals, Then Spread On CropsResidual sludge from treating waste water has been turned into a money-spinner but what are the costs to health of ‘the most pollutant-rich manmade substance on Earth’? chemicals and biological wastes from water, only to spread them on soil everywhere we live, work and play defies common sense,”
Dairy cows rest outside at Stoneridge Farm in Arundel, Maine, in August 2019. The farm was forced to shut down after sludge spread on the land was linked to high levels of PFAS in the milk. Photograph: Robert F Bukaty/AP
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Labor:
Worldwide Austerity’s ‘Race to the Bottom’: Capitalism’s Triumph: Labor Rights Violated in Every Country on Earth In what country are labor rights fully respected? The sad answer is: none. Labor rights are routinely violated around the world, and the trend is only getting worse. The International Trade Union Confederation has again issued its annual Global Rights Index and the result is no better than in past years. It’s worse. For example, the number of countries that exclude workers from the right to establish or join a union increased from 92 in 2018 to 107 in 2019. Even in Europe, the region with the (relatively) best conditions for working people, half the countries exclude at least some groups of workers from freely associating by allowing “non-standard” forms of work such as zero-hour contracts, temp work or misclassifying people working through online platforms as “self-employed.” By Pete Dolack
Economy:
The Silence, of the House Democrats, Is Deafening: There’s Nothing Normal About the Fed Pumping Hundreds of Billions Weekly to Unnamed Banks on Wall Street: “Somebody’s Got a Problem” Yesterday, the House Financial Services Committee released its hearing schedule for October. There is not a peep about holding a hearing on the unprecedented hundreds of billions of dollars that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is pumping into unnamed banks on Wall Street at a time when there is no public acknowledgement of any kind of financial crisis taking place. Congressional committees should have been instantly on top of the Fed’s actions when they first started on September 17 because the Fed had gone completely rogue from 2007 to 2010 in funneling an unfathomable $29 trillionin revolving loans to Wall Street and global banks without authority or even awareness from Congress. The Fed also fought a multi-year court battle with the media in an effort to keep its giant money funnel a secret. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Obama/Trump Working Class Austerity: The Pauperization of the Working Class!Shadow Government Statistucs 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 ShadowGovernment Statistics Alternate Unemployment Rate for September 2019 is 20.9%.World:
Ecuador: government’s austerity package sparks mass uprising The announcement by the government of Lenín Moreno of a US$2.2bn package of economic counter-reforms on 1 October has led to mass demonstrations and strikes. The government, which fears losing control of the situation, has responded with brutal police repression and yesterday, 3 October, declared a state of emergency for 60 days. By Jorge MartinBritain in turmoil: Let us rise to the challenge Boris Johnson is preparing to fight an election on the lines of “the People vs Parliament”. Labour must meet this demagoguery with mass mobilisation of workers and youth, organised around a bold class programme of socialist policies.Bureaucracy undermines MP selections: boot out the Blairites! Over the past several weeks, three Blairite MPs have been successfully “triggered” by grassroots activists: Diana Johnson in Hull, Margaret Hodge in Barking, and Roger Godsiff in Birmingham. The latter has the distinction of being Britain’s “laziest MP” (with the fewest parliamentary appearances), and notoriously gave his backing to the protests against LGBT teaching in schools. Byjoe Attard
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!
Trump Plan to Allow New Fracking on California Coast, Central Valley Moves Forward
How the U.S. Military Undermines the American Economy Now, nearly six decades later, Eisenhower’s warning has become institutionalized. Military spending not only strongly influences, if not shapes, corporate capitalism but might well pose a threat to the future of the nation’s economic development. Eisenhower surly must be spinning in grave given how much influence the military industrial complex wields today. In 1960, the military budget stood at $344 billion; today, the military complex, including the ever-growing intelligence apparatus, cost taxpayers over $1 trillion. Military spending for the period October 1, 2019, through September 30, 2020, is at $989 billion and covers the Dept. of Defense, veterans’ benefits, international military assistance, nuclear weapons spending and military intelligence. By David Rosen
The United States of Bribery and Sanctioning The democratrepublicans are now confidently toying with the idea that Trump could be impeached because there seems to be a possibility that Trump tried to use some of the US’ institutionalized, bipartisanly supported bribery of a foreign government to try to insure his own political advantage. The entrapment into privately profitable insurance ventures through the use of bribes and sanctions has long been widely and very highly regarded in Washington. By Clark T. Scott
Environment:
The Battles Now One real battle we are in now – human caused global warming – is a battle we realized very belatedly we are in. The other – the political one – is, in a President Trump retweet, heading toward “a Civil War like fracture in this nation” and is a Mad Hatter sort of battle in which both sides see the other through a shattered looking glass, and hear each other through a madhouse Twitter echo chamber. The battle in which we are fighting for survival on this planet is a battle with ourselves, though the economics we have constructed now seems to lie outside ourselves as an unimpeachable reality. By Joseph Natoli
The Silence, of the House Democrats, Is Deafening: 
World:
