During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three Point Political Program: Austerity, Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and The Iron Heel.
Always Remember That Obamba Supported the Wall Street Bailout and Remember That President Obama, With a Majority Democrat Legislature, Started the United States Capitalist Austerity Program — The Race to the Botom or 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!
Due to Capitalism’s Drive Towards Environment Genocide, The Slogan From The Manifesto Of The Communist Party, “Workers Of The World, Unite. You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains!” We should edit it, to read, Workers Of The World, Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains and the Survivial of Humanity to Gain! — Roland Sheppard
The Banks Profit From ‘The Drug War’. There is a consensus among U.S. Congressional Investigators, former bankers and international banking experts that U.S. and European banks launder between $500 billion and $1 trillion of dirty money each year, half of which is laundered by U.S. banks alone. As Senator Carl Levin summarizes the record: “Estimates are that $500 billion to $1 trillion of international criminal proceeds are moved internationally and deposited into bank accounts annually. It is estimated that half of that money comes to the United States”. Over a decade then, between $2.5 and $5 trillion criminal proceeds have been laundered by U.S. banks and circulated in the U.S. financial circuits. Senator Levin’s statement however, only covers criminal proceeds, according to U.S. laws. It does not include illegal transfers and capital flows from corrupt political leaders, or tax evasion by overseas businesses. —James Petras. “Dirty Money”Foundation of US Growth and Empire Size and Scope of Money Laundering by US Banks (2001)
The October revolution laid the foundation of a new culture, taking everybody into consideration, and for that very reason immediately acquiring international significance. Even supposing for a moment that owing to unfavourable circumstances and hostile blows the Soviet regime should be temporarily overthrown, the inexpungable imprint of the October revolution would nevertheless remain upon the whole future development of mankind. – Leon Trotsky – The History of the Russian 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.
Mexico: One Failed US War Doesn’t Justify Another On November 4, ten dual US-Mexican citizens — members of an offshoot sect of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — died in a highway ambush, apparently the latest casualties of rampant and violent drug cartel activity in northern Mexico. US president Donald Trump promptly called upon “Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth. We merely await a call from your great new president!” … The solution is for the US to re-situate American demand for recreational drugs from violent and corrupt “black markets” to peaceful legal markets. After several decades of US regulatory, law enforcement, and military war on drugs, the “winners” of the war remain the cartels (who rake in billions serving customers forbidden to buy what they want legally) and US government agents (who dispose of huge budgets and earn comfortable salaries while boasting little impact on drug use at either the demand or supply ends). By Thomas Knapp
Inequality and the Iron Law of Decaying Public Services Where wealth concentrates, our commons will always downsize. At some point, in every community becoming more unequal, affluent people will come to feel they’ll be better off going life alone, on their own nickel — better off installing their own private courts, better off sending their kids to private schools, better off living in a privately guarded gated development. By Sam Pizzigati
By Trying to Silence Sanders, The Corporate Media De-Legitimize Themselves Sanders has been made into a non-person, and his proposals routinely distorted, because the corporate media want Americans to meekly submit to the Race to the Bottom. “The system was suffering a crisis of legitimacy: nobody believed the official narrative anymore.” Bernie Sanders’ campaign has finally gone full-throat with the obvious: the Democrat-aligned corporate media have thrown all journalistic principles to the wind to impose a “Bernie Blackout.” How can someone who was the most popular politician in the nation in 2017 be made into a non-person? It’s all intimately entwined with the multiple crises afflicting late stage capitalism. In the absence of massive, grassroots movements, corporate voices always drown out all the others. Capitalist ownership of the media allows the rich to frame their own worldview as the political “center,” thus relegating contending ideologies to the “extremes” of left or right. In this sense, “centrism” is nothing more than the political position of the corporate owners, who construct media versions of reality that make corporate-concocted policies seem the most logical, commonsensical and socially responsible approach to the world’s problems. As long as the rich can sustain broad public trust in the “truth” of their “journalistic” products — newspapers, electronic newscasts, books and other media created by professional operatives directly answerable to rich owners – widespread revolt against the corporate order is unlikely. By Glen Ford, BAR executive editor
The Latest From Cancer Alley: ‘If There’s A Spill, It’s A Disaster’: Living Next To A Giant Lake Of Radioactive Waste Louisiana activists are fighting to stop industrial development in a polluted, economically struggling area, and a major concern is a fertilizer plant The rose bush in Shirley Melancon’s front yard used to bloom full and pink, but recently she noticed the flowers from the 100-year old plant are coming in white and shriveled. She doesn’t know why this is, but it’s difficult not to wonder if there’s a link to the sprawling radioactive waste storage structure that sits less than a mile from her tidy cottage in the fourth district of St James Parish, Louisiana. It is a gargantuan manmade 960-acre lake containing hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic, radioactive water that sits on top of a 200ft pile of waste byproduct, an enormous, chalky white wall that makes the bulldozers and cranes atop look like children’s toys. The massive white mound is shaped like a giant bathtub, formed with a naturally radioactive element called phosphogypsum and filled with toxic cargo. It has reshaped the horizon in this parish, which has transitioned from a center of slavery, to black-owned farmland, to an industrial corridor. By Lauren ZanolliThe Fire This Time: As Fires Rage in World’s Largest Rainforest, NASA Warns ‘Human Activities Are Drying Out the Amazon One scientist said that “if this continues, the forest may no longer be able to sustain itself,” which would seriously hamper efforts to limit global temperature rise and avert climate catastrophe. As thousands of intentional fires continued to burn up swaths of the world’s largest and most biodiverse rainforest Tuesday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration warned that based on 20 years of ground and satellite data, “human activities are drying out the Amazon” and jeopardizing its ability to sustain itself. The findings have experts at NASA and beyond concerned about the implications for the Amazon, a rainforest that annually pulls billions of tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, which helps to limit global temperature rise and prevent more catastrophic climate change. By Jessica Corbett
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Labor:
Chicago Teachers Score a Historic Victory The city’s Black-led union, with potent support from the city’s Black and brown communities, faced down the new Black mayor. “The newly ratified contract is a start in creating a pathway out of poverty for many of the workers,” said the statement by SEIU Local 73.” After two weeks of strike by Chicago teachers and service staff, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) have arrived at a tentative deal, bringing an end to the strike. The city administration agreed to all the demands of the protesting teachers which would lead to the single biggest hike in spending on public education, of any school districts in the US in recent memory. Classes began November 1 The new deal was agreed upon by the teachers, service staff and the city administration on October 30. However, the stubbornness of the city administration led to the strike extending to another day. By Peoples Dispatch StaffEconomy:
Wall Street’s Liquidity Crisis: It’s Not Getting Better This morning, Wall Street’s money spigot arm of the Federal Reserve, the New York Fed, paid out $35 billion in 14-day term loans to Wall Street’s trading houses. The problem was, this morning the banks wanted $41.15 billion or $6.15 billion more than the Fed was offering. That’s a very clear sign that liquidity remains tight on Wall Street and we have yet to enter the pivotal year-end period when banks try to dress up their books by dumping or parking their most toxic positions. Between the term loan and the overnight loan, the New York Fed paid out $115 billion this morning to unnamed securities firms on Wall Street. (The Fed won’t say who is doing all of this borrowing and Congress can’t summon the willpower to hold a hearing.) By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Deutsche Bank Headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany
World:
World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency. Exactly 40 years ago, scientists from 50 nations met at the First World Climate Conference (in Geneva 1979) and agreed that alarming trends for climate change made it urgently necessary to act. Since then, similar alarms have been made through the 1992 Rio Summit, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 2015 Paris Agreement, as well as scores of other global assemblies and scientists’ explicit warnings of insufficient progress (Ripple et al. 2017). Yet greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are still rapidly rising, with increasingly damaging effects on the Earth’s climate. An immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis (IPCC 2018). By William J Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Thomas M Newsome, Phoebe Barnard, and William R Moomaw
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!
Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many will protest that they can’t do it. The most frequent complaint that teachers hear that it’s boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issues here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be boring. What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate New Flesh that is too wired to concentrate and the confining concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored means simply to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, You Tube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way they want a hamburger; the fail to grasp—and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension—the indigestibility, the difficult is Nietzsche. – Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
America’s Education System: Teaching the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing I am a substitute teacher (grades K-12) in a public school system located in Virginia, a state on the eastern seaboard of the United States. For many years prior to becoming a substitute teacher, I also taught at a private school in Virginia. Tuition and fees at the private school are approximately $42,000 (USD), the public schools are, of course, tuition free. To be sure, there are highly motivated students in both educational settings that call into question Mark Fisher’s observation above. But in the main, both organization’s struggle with figuring out if they are working with their subjects as students or as consumers of services provided by teachers and administrators. By John Stanton
Quotes of the Day:
The Fire This Time: As Fires Rage in World’s Largest Rainforest, NASA Warns ‘Human Activities Are Drying Out the Amazon One scientist said that “if this continues, the forest may no longer be able to sustain itself,” which would seriously hamper efforts to limit global temperature rise and avert climate catastrophe. As thousands of intentional fires continued to burn up swaths of the world’s largest and most biodiverse rainforest Tuesday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration warned that based on 20 years of ground and satellite data, “human activities are drying out the Amazon” and jeopardizing its ability to sustain itself. The findings have experts at NASA and beyond concerned about the implications for the Amazon, a rainforest that annually pulls billions of tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, which helps to limit global temperature rise and prevent more catastrophic climate change. By Jessica Corbett 
Economy:
