Veterans Day Was Supposed to Mark the End of the ‘War to End AllWars’! Instead, it Marks the begining of United States Imperialism’s Permanent World War for Permanent Word Peace!
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
Never the less, the constitution was written to allow only white males of property to vote, legalized slavery, and stated that Black People were only 4/5 human. As Noam Chomsky stated in his interview on American History and Democracy: . . . If you go back to the record of the Constitutional Convention, which took place in 1787, almost immediately after the end of the war, you see that they are already moving in another direction. James Madison — who was the main framer, and one of the Founding Fathers who was most libertarian — makes it very clear that the new constitutional system must be designed so as to ensure that the government will, in his words, “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” and bar the way to anything like agrarian reform. The determination was made that America could not allow functioning democracy, since people would use their political power to attack the wealth of the minority of the opulent. Therefore, Madison argues, the country should be placed in the hands of the wealthier set of men, as he put it. . . . To this day, we have a government and state apparatus that is designed to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” — there is no Democracy! It has been endemic to this society to expand westward which included the genocide of the Native Americans. — My Forefathers and The 1%’s Forefathers
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.
Hey Bernie! Workers Need Power, Not A Seat At The Table Proposals that are gimmicks aren’t the answer Bernie Sanders claims he has uncovered the secret to making things better for the working class. Let’s get on the board of directors of corporations and workers can change this thing from the inside! Some are calling it socialism. But Marxists would disagree. Does this plan really help working people? The nature of capitalism. These proposals are, in the end, just gimmicks. They face certain defeat, and they retain the capitalist system. This is not socialism because owners still have control and profit still rules. Under capitalism, exploitation only gets worse and worse. In this age of advanced technology, robotics and artificial intelligence, labor is steadily eliminated or reduced to the most mundane tasks. The constant drive for “productivity” exhausts workers and pits them against each other. By Dennis Sanders
. . . Not only is it necessary to fight back and reassert our rights, but we need to broaden these rights to protect working people on the economic level and against the threat of new wars, racism, and antilabor drives. We need a new bill of rights to meet the present-day needs of the majority.
The Socialist Workers Party proposes the following:
Right to a job;
Right to an adequate income;
Right to free education;
Right to free medical care;
Right to secure retirement;
Right to know the truth about economic and political policies that affect our lives;
Right of oppressed national minorities to control their own affairs;
Right to decide economic and political policy. (More)
Middle East Oil Wars — The US Capitalists’ Permanent Quest for Control of Oil: Mandate to Defeat ISIS Gives US Authority to Control Syrian Oil Fields, Shoot Syrian Govt Official Who Would Want That Control, Says Pentagon “This is not a new mission.” Pentagon officials asserted Thursday U.S. military authority over Syrian oil fields because U.S. forces are acting under the goal of “protecting Americans from terrorist activity” and would be within their rights to shoot a representative of the Syrian government who attempted to retake control over that country’s national resource. By Andrea GermanosLeft is the New Right, or Why Marx Matters The American obsession with electoral politics is odd in that ‘the people’ have so little say in electoral outcomes and that the outcomes only dance around the edges of most people’s lives. It isn’t so much that the actions of elected leaders are inconsequential as that other factors— economic, historical, structural and institutional, do more to determine ‘politics.’ To use an agrarian metaphor, it’s as if the miller was put forward as determining the harvest. The American left has had an outsider role in this politics from the inception of the nation as a capitalist oligarchy to the improbable cobbling together of the idea that popular democracy can exist alongside concentrated wealth. If the powers that be wanted popular democracy, they could stop impeding its creation. The ‘first mover’ advantage, that once gained, power is used to close the door behind it, has be understood for centuries in the realms of commerce and politics. By Rob UrieEnvironment:
My Friend Was Murdered for Trying to Save the Amazon “They’re watching us,” the Guardians whispered, as we walked in the dark. “But we’re watching them, and this is our forest. We know it inside out. We’ll catch them.” We were heading deeper into the forest, towards an illegal logging hotspot. I was on an operation with the Guardians of the Amazon, indigenous people from the Guajajara tribe with one clear objective: to protect their land. They do this not only for their own families, but also to protect their uncontacted neighbors, people from the Awá tribe, who share this territory. I was invited to join them as part of my work for Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples, who support the Guardians’ work and help amplify their voices on the global stage. By Sarah Shenker
PG&E Spent Millions On Lobbying Following Bankruptcy, Wining And Dining Lawmakers Who Sponsored Bailout The Decision By Pacific Gas & Electric to declare bankruptcy in January did not prevent the utility giant from continuing to spend big on political influence in California’s Statehouse. The investor-owned utility’s transmission lines have been blamed for multiple wildfires, including the Tubbs fire in October 2017 and the Camp Fire wildfire in November 2018, the two most destructive and deadly wildfires in California history. The company infamously neglected necessary safety upgrades on infrastructure known to be a fire hazard, instead choosing to spend its ratepayers’ money on executive compensation, billions of dollars of investor dividends, and on buying political influence.The company’s plunge into Chapter 11, widely viewed as maneuver to avoid legal liability for wildfire victims, has temporarily suspended dividend payments to investors, but it hasn’t stopped the company from showering the political system with money in an attempt to secure a preferential bond that could leave customers picking up the tab to cover the company’s negligent behavior. By Lee FangAs New York Takes Exxon to Court, Big Oil’s Strategy Against Climate Lawsuits Is Slowly Unveiled Last week, in a historic first, the former CEO of a major oil company took the witness stand in a New York City courtroom and spent four hours defending his company against charges that it misled investors about the potential impact of global warming on its viability as a business. Rex Tillerson, who led ExxonMobil from 2006 until the end of 2016 when he became U.S. secretary of state, was grilled by an attorney for the New York State attorney general for allegedly participating in a “longstanding fraudulent scheme” by Exxon to fool investors. More specifically, the company is charged with exaggerating the stringency of its financial safeguards in pricing risks from regulations restricting greenhouse gas emissions, according to the complaint filed last year in New York state court. But Tillerson’s appearance was just one of several recent watershed moments for efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its dominant role in causing climate change. These included a former Exxon scientist giving first-ever oil industry whistleblower testimony before Congress, a Senate hearing on how dark money blocks climate change action, the Supreme Court allowing three major climate liability suits to proceed, Maui and Honolulu announcing they will sue the fossil fuel industry, and, perhaps most significant, the Massachusetts attorney general filing suit against Exxon. By Dan Zegart
The Feds are Paying Big Oil to Pollute The one thing you never want to hear your dentist say is “oops!” It’s also alarming to hear from a former U.S. senator — 25 years after he passed a temporary oil subsidy for Big Oil. With world petroleum prices low at the time, Senator J. Bennett Johnston (D-LA) pushed through a special break in 1995, temporarily exempting the giants from paying federal royalty fees for the publicly owned crude they take from the Gulf of Mexico. The idea was to give a brief reprieve on royalties to encourage oil corporations to drill here. But — oops! — our lawmakers made a costly slip up: They forgot to specify that the exemption was temporary. Once market prices recovered, the corporations were supposed to resume payments to us taxpayers. “It was never the intent that everybody would get a free ride forever,” says one official. By Jim Hightower
Eating the Amazon Catastrophic fires have been burning all over the world, not just in Amazonia, but also in Siberia, Indonesia, and the Congo basin. These fires are ecological weapons of mass destruction and displacement resulting in habitat destruction and extermination of other species, violent land grabs from Indigenous peoples, murder of forest protectors, and climate refugees. Most of the disastrous fires in the Amazon are the result of clearing forests for cattle pasture or for crops to feed the cattle. In response to the intentional conflagrations in the Amazon, the actor Leonardo DiCaprio was chided recently for daring to suggest a way to significantly deal with the destruction: People can simply stop eating cattle. By Steven KrichbaumThere Are 2,000 Untested Chemicals in Packaged Foods — and It’s Legal A major but largely glossed over report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), an environmental and public health nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., shows that thousands of untested chemicals (an estimated 2,000, to be exact) are found in conventional packaged foods purchasable in U.S. supermarkets. And yes, all of them are legal. The extensive collection of permissible additives includes several known or suspected carcinogens, such as synthetic sodium nitrate, found in processed meats and considered probably carcinogenic by the World Health Organization, and butylated hydroxyanisole, also known as BHA, a chemical listed as a cancer-causing chemical by the state of Californiaand found in commonplace items like frozen pepperoni pizza. Other unappealing chemicals are commonly found in our food packaging, such as polypropylene, sulfuric acid and bisphenol A — all of which can have impacts on human health and the environment. Byy Melissa Kravitz HoeffnerDeforestation in Brazil Jumped by 80% in One Year: Study Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon region increased by 80 percent in September compared to the same month last year, according to a private study released on Wednesday stating that 802 square kilometers of forest was lost in the zone. The Amazon Institute of People and the Environment (Imazon), which has been analyzing the planet’s largest tropical forest for the past three decades, said in its report that the largest portion of the deforestation (48 percent of the total) occurred on private lands. Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has hit the highest August level since the current monitoring system began in 2015, underscoring concerns about the weakening of forest protection under President Jair Bolsonaro. The world’s biggest terrestrial carbon sink lost 1,114.8 sq km (430 sq miles) – equivalent to the area of Hong Kong – in the first 26 days of this month, according to preliminary data from the government’s satellite monitoring agency. The data does not include damage caused by fires currently sweeping parts of the Amazon.
Sierra Club Takes a Commendable Turn on Population, Climate Change, and Inequality The Sierra Club – long a retrograde proponent of saving the planet by driving a Tesla, eating wild caught salmon, and voting blue – took positive environmental leadership with their end of the year issue of the Sierra magazine. Stating it is “time to fix the population fixation,” they examine the interactions of population, climate change, and inequality. This commendable development from bourgeois lifestyle environmentalism to a more genuine red-green understanding, though, has a way to go. The ideology of over-population diverts criticisms of capitalist social relations of unequal distribution. It serves to justify a system, capitalism, which creates needs for the many while satisfying them only for the very few. The Sierra Club, in a bold turn, now argues that the problem is not the fertility of women but “overconsumption” and the “outsized contribution of the wealthiest few to the climate crisis and the extinction emergency.” By Roger Harris
A Renewed Call For Feminist Resistance To Population Control We call for integrated responses to climate change, environmental racism and toxicity that promote health, including sexual and reproductive health, through social, reproductive and climate justice frameworks. As part of this web of actions, we demand that governments, international agencies and other social institutions:
Hold those most responsible for climate change accountable and systematically address environmental racism as temperatures and waters rise.
Question the expansive and highly unequal growth logic of capitalist relations of production and consumption.
Avoid or reject “solutions” to climate change that are based on individual, consumer decision-making, such as “eating green” (rather than on green production and distribution) or not having babies. These solutions can be superficial, let the biggest polluters off the hook, and further exacerbate inequalities. As do “solutions” stemming from privatization of land and water which deepen inequalities by benefiting corporations instead of small-scale farmers.
Reject policies that rely on fertility control and engineering population size to serve development agendas or to counter climate change.
Fight nationalism, racism and the heightening of borders. Recognize the right of peoples to move freely and safely.
Reject militarized conservationism, the incorporation of family planning into conservation initiatives and other such policies which seek to shift responsibility for loss of biodiversity and destruction of wildlife from global corporate actors to local communities.
Protect the full informed consent and rights of trial participants and reject exploitation in scientific experimentation.
Promote reproductive justice and a comprehensive vision for sexual and reproductive health within a framework of universal access to holistic health care services that includes a robust conversation about conceptive and contraceptive methods, access and safety; parental, child and elder health care; education on sexuality, gender and healthy relationships; abortion services; HIV testing, prevention and treatment; and actively uproots racist, ableist and anti-LGBTQI biases in healthcare.
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
The United States Capitalists Rapers and Pedophiles Protected by The Media Mononopoly: NBC, ABC and CBS Now Appear to Have Run Cover For World’s Most Powerful Rape Rings NBC, ABC and CBS News have all now appeared to run cover for some of the world’s most powerful rape rings, allegedly killing stories and firing employees who tried to expose the outlets. As three of America’s biggest networks, these outlets have each become embroiled in controversy in 2019 following multiple separate reports that they have played a part in covering up some of the world’s most powerful rape and pedophile rings.The allegations range from killing entire stories outing disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, shutting down an interview detailing accusations against alleged child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and firing an employee who might have tried to hold an outlet responsible. By Shelby Talcott
Jeffrey Epstein Harvey Weinstein
Labor:
Economy:
This Is a Horror Story: How Private Equity Vampires Are Killing Everything Corporate plundering did not start and will not stop with Deadspin. here are many, many different versions of the vampire’s tale, but in its most timeworn Eurocentric telling, vampires are evil’s upper crust: beautiful, blue-blooded aristocrats draped in velvet, exuding idle menace. Dracula and his cursed kin are the undead 1 percent and act accordingly: terrorizing villages, murdering peasants, siphoning off others’ lifeblood, and turning up their aquiline noses at the slightest hint of dissent. By Kim Kelly
This Federal Agency Is Investigating Why the Fed Is Bailing Out Wall Street Again Jelena McWilliams is a Trump appointee who currently serves as the Chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the federal agency responsible for insuring the deposits of commercial banks and savings associations in the United States. McWilliams also knows her way around Wall Street. Her resume at the FDIC states that “Before entering public service, she practiced corporate and securities law at Morrison & Foerster LLP in Palo Alto, California, and Hogan & Hartson LLP (now Hogan Lovells LLP) in Washington, D.C.” As a corporate lawyer, McWilliams “represented publicly and privately-held companies in mergers and acquisitions, securities offerings, strategic business ventures, venture capital investments, and general corporate matters.” By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Argentina: 2019 elections – prepare for the future! Mauricio Macri has been defeated at the ballot box. Undoubtedly, these elections have demonstrated the willingness of the workers, students and youth to put an end to Argentina’s structural adjustment policies.Yet, in the absence of a Left alternative that could defeat Juntos por el Cambio(Together for Change), the tool that the masses found to strike at Macrismo was voting for the Frente de Todos (A Front for All) of Alberto Fernández. This marks the beginning of a new political phase in the country. Britain: Tom Watson departure leaves Blairites in disarray Labour members were delivered an enormous shock by the sudden resignation of Tom Watson. He was a stalwart of the party’s right wing. Nobody expected him to leave the party like this. His unexpected departure has effectively decapitated the right wing of the party. Throughout the course of Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, Tom Watson has been the undisputed leader of the right wing and their attempts to remove the twice-elected Labour leader.At times it seemed that others, such as Hilary Benn, might become their champion. But Tom Watson’s position as deputy leader of the party proved decisive, giving the right wing’s attacks on Corbyn the appearance of legitimacy. By Daniel Morley
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!
Quotes of the Day:
U.S.:
Left is the New Right, or Why Marx Matters The American obsession with electoral politics is odd in that ‘the people’ have so little say in electoral outcomes and that the outcomes only dance around the edges of most people’s lives. It isn’t so much that the actions of elected leaders are inconsequential as that other factors— economic, historical, structural and institutional, do more to determine ‘politics.’ To use an agrarian metaphor, it’s as if the miller was put forward as determining the harvest. The American left has had an outsider role in this politics from the inception of the nation as a capitalist oligarchy to the improbable cobbling together of the idea that popular democracy can exist alongside concentrated wealth. If the powers that be wanted popular democracy, they could stop impeding its creation. The ‘first mover’ advantage, that once gained, power is used to close the door behind it, has be understood for centuries in the realms of commerce and politics. By Rob Urie 
Environment:
As New York Takes Exxon to Court, Big Oil’s Strategy Against Climate Lawsuits Is Slowly Unveiled Last week, in a historic first, the former CEO of a major oil company took the witness stand in a New York City courtroom and spent four hours defending his company against charges that it misled investors about the potential impact of global warming on its viability as a business. Rex Tillerson, who led ExxonMobil from 2006 until the end of 2016 when he became U.S. secretary of state, was grilled by an attorney for the New York State attorney general for allegedly participating in a “longstanding fraudulent scheme” by Exxon to fool investors. More specifically, the company is charged with exaggerating the stringency of its financial safeguards in pricing risks from regulations restricting greenhouse gas emissions, according to the complaint filed last year in New York state court. But Tillerson’s appearance was just one of several recent watershed moments for efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its dominant role in causing climate change. These included a former Exxon scientist giving first-ever oil industry whistleblower testimony before Congress, a Senate hearing on how dark money blocks climate change action, the Supreme Court allowing three major climate liability suits to proceed, Maui and Honolulu announcing they will sue the fossil fuel industry, and, perhaps most significant, the Massachusetts attorney general filing suit against Exxon. By Dan Zegart
There Are 2,000 Untested Chemicals in Packaged Foods — and It’s Legal A major but largely glossed over report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), an environmental and public health nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., shows that thousands of untested chemicals (an estimated 2,000, to be exact) are found in conventional packaged foods purchasable in U.S. supermarkets. And yes, all of them are legal. The extensive collection of permissible additives includes several known or suspected carcinogens, such as synthetic sodium nitrate, found in processed meats and considered probably carcinogenic by the World Health Organization, and butylated hydroxyanisole, also known as BHA, a chemical listed as a cancer-causing chemical by the state of Californiaand found in commonplace items like frozen pepperoni pizza. Other unappealing chemicals are commonly found in our food packaging, such as polypropylene, sulfuric acid and bisphenol A — all of which can have impacts on human health and the environment. Byy Melissa Kravitz Hoeffner
Deforestation in Brazil Jumped by 80% in One Year: Study Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon region increased by 80 percent in September compared to the same month last year, according to a private study released on Wednesday stating that 802 square kilometers of forest was lost in the zone. The Amazon Institute of People and the Environment (Imazon), which has been analyzing the planet’s largest tropical forest for the past three decades, said in its report that the largest portion of the deforestation (48 percent of the total) occurred on private lands. Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has hit the highest August level since the current monitoring system began in 2015, underscoring concerns about the weakening of forest protection under President Jair Bolsonaro. The world’s biggest terrestrial carbon sink lost 1,114.8 sq km (430 sq miles) – equivalent to the area of Hong Kong – in the first 26 days of this month, according to preliminary data from the government’s satellite monitoring agency. The data does not include damage caused by fires currently sweeping parts of the Amazon.
