Always Remember That Obama Supported the Wall Street Bailout and Remember That President Obama, With a Majority Democrat Legislature, Established, in writing, the United States Capitalist Austerity Program — The Race to the Bottom/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!
While carbon dioxide is typically painted as the bad boy of greenhouse gases, methane is roughly 30 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas. New research in the journal Nature indicates that for each degree that Earth’s temperature rises, the amount of methane entering the atmosphere from microorganisms dwelling in lake sediment and freshwater wetlands — the primary sources of the gas — will increase several times. As temperatures rise, the relative increase of methane emissions will outpace that of carbon dioxide from these sources, the researchers report. — A More Potent Greenhouse Gas Than Carbon Dioxide, Methane Emissions Will Leap As Earth Warms
PLASTIC IS everywhere. It is not merely that the material, rarely used in consumer products before 1950, has become ubiquitous in the homes, cars and offices Americans inhabit. Scientists using remotely operated submersibles announced last month that they had found plastic microparticles in the deep ocean off California’s idyllic Monterey Bay, with, surprisingly, the highest concentrations in the middle of the water column. Researchers have found the stuff on isolated Alpine peaks, in animals’ digestive tracts and in human stools. Some effects on the ecosystem, such as animals getting tangled in or choking on plastic waste, are obvious. It is alarmingly unclear what all the tiny microparticles ending up in the environment — and human bodies — is doing. — Washington Post Editorial Board, Plastic is everywhere. We can no longer ignore that.
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.
‘Read Every Word of This’: WaPo Investigation Reveals US Officials’ Public Deception Campaign on Afghan War Officials repeatedly told the public “progress” was being made, but new documents show they knew that wasn’t true. A major Washington Postinvestigation released Monday is a confirmation of the peace movement’s message that “there’s no military solution in Afghanistan.” That’s according to Paul Kawika Martin, senior director of policy and political affairs at Peace Action, replying to “The Afghanistan Papers.” The report exposes how top officials spanning the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations waged a deliberate misinformation campaign to conceal the total failures of the 18-year war in Afghanistan.The bombshell from investigative reporter Craig Whitlock “broadly resembles the Pentagon Papers,” and it is based on over 2,000 pages of notes from interviews with a federal agency that “bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day” and belie comments by officials “who assured Americans year after year” of progress made in the war.By Andrea GermanosWhy Not Also Go With “The Kitchen Table” Impeachable Offenses for Removal? Will the Democrats move to impeach Trump for a narrow brace of violations and accept that the Senate Republicans will keep this outlaw in the White House? Or will they present the Senate with the President’s many proven impeachable offenses, thereby requiring the Senate Republicans, before live national television, in a public trial to defend Trump’s indefensible behavior?Let’s start with the signal statement by Trump: “Then I have Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” For almost three years, he has proceeded to engage in monarchical unconstitutional behavior in far more repeated, brazen ways than any preceding president. It is not even close. By Ralph Nader
The Great American Shakedown The Democratic Party and its liberal supporters are perplexed. They presented hours of evidence of an impeachable offense, although they studiously avoided charging Donald Trump with impeachable offenses also carried out by Democratic presidents, including the continuation or expansion of presidential wars not declared by Congress, exercising line-item veto power, playing prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner to kill individuals, including U.S. citizens, anywhere on the planet, violating due process and misusing executive orders. Because civics is no longer taught in most American schools, they devoted a day to constitutional scholars who provided the Civics 101 case for impeachment. The liberal press, cheerleading the impeachment process, saturated the media landscape with live coverage, interminable analysis, constant character assassination of Trump and giddy speculation. And yet, it has made no difference. Public opinion remains largely unaffected. By Chris Hedges
Bloomberg Condoned Sexual Assault by NYPD New York must be the ugliest and the dirtiest city in the world. It must have the ugliest buildings and the nastiest people. It’s got to have the worst cops.– James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk Sunday, Nov. 24, I watched some white media women led by Stephanie Ruhle, a former Bloomberg employee, gush all over Bloomberg’s announcement that he was running for president. When the interviewer asked about Bloomberg’s condoning Stop and Frisk, Ms. Ruhle said that it brought down the crime rate. She probably had black and Latinx men in mind, whom bourgeois feminists regard as disposable because they’re in no position to advance their careers.Hundreds of thousands were stopped and frisked with the approval of Michael Bloomberg and others. Some of those assigned to the task have psychological issues. When I read that one of the cops, Dan Pantaleo, stripped two black men and fondled their genitals, I figured he must have had an orgasm while choking Eric Garner to death. By Ishmael Reed
Can a Coal Town Reinvent Itself? A coal town in southwestern Virginia has been trying for years. Hope is running thin. GRUNDY, Va. — Jay Rife surveys the landscape — hundreds of flat, grassy acres reclaimed from a spent mountaintop mine once operated by the Paramont Coal Company. A few handsome homes stand on one end of the project. An 80,000-square-foot shell, to house some future manufacturing operation, is being built on another. For the intrepid, there are trails for all-terrain vehicles. There’s an R.V. park. The whole site has been wired for broadband. Elk have been imported from Kentucky for tourists to look at. Buchanan County, where Grundy sits, has spent $35 million to $40 million on the development, called Southern Gap, some seven miles from town along U.S. 460. Mr. Rife, the head of the county’s Industrial Development Authority, says the project “is going to be the salvation of Buchanan County. By Eduardo PorterCoal and the Regions Left Behind The NYT had an article that focused on Buchanan County, Virginia as an example of a left behind area in the United States. The county’s economy had centered on coal. While the discussion implies that its downturn is a recent story, the data presented in the piece shows that most of the decline occurred more than two decades ago. The county had more than 5,000 coal mining jobs in the early 1980s. This had fallen to just over 1,000 by the late 1990s. While there was some uptick in coal jobs from 2009 to 2013, the current level is not very different from the level of twenty years ago. By Dean Baker
Environment:
Week 150: Trump Is Pro-Fence When It Comes to Immigration, Anti-Fence When It Comes to Protecting Kids’ Health Plus, the solar industry pleads for mercy, and the president says he thinks about climate change “all the time.” Hmm. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday proposed changes to fencing guidelines around power plants. The existing rule requires utilities to build fences to make clear the division between public land, where the law requires that air quality be measured, and private spaces, where it does not. The new proposal spares companies the trouble of building a fence. Instead, Trump’s EPA says a “no trespassing” sign would suffice. By Brian Palmer
East Siberian Sea Is Boiling With Methane Russian scientists on an Arctic expedition have discovered, for the first time, methane “boiling” on the surface of the water that is visible to the naked eye. Forget high-tech detection devices, the methane is so pronounced that it can be scooped from the water in buckets, as Newsweek reported. The research team from Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU) found the methane leak east of Bennett Island in the East Siberian Sea. The methane bubbles, which create a boiling appearance, spanned an area over 50 feet, as the Telegraph reported. The concentration of atmospheric methane in that spot was 16 parts per million, more than nine times higher than the atmospheric average. By Jordan Davidson
Lawless Judges and Prosecutors Block Mumia’s Road to Freedom Linn Washington, the Philadelphia-based legal scholar, told a New York City teach-in in support of Mumia Abu Jamal that the nation’s best known political prisoner would be free already if not for massive prosecutorial and judicial misconduct. “If these judges ever follow the law Mumia will be out immediately – but they don’t follow the law,” said Washington.
Support for Medicare for All is a “National Consensus” “When an issue gets to the point where it has a national consensus behind it,” as does Medicare for All, “the people who profit from the system will do all they can to stop it,” said Kevin Zeese, of Popular Resistance. Democratic presidential candidate “Elizabeth Warren’s popularity dropped like a rock,” said Zeese, when she watered down her support for Medicare for All.
Black Alliance for Peace: It’s Good That NATO is in Disarray Although Democrats and militarists bemoan President Trump’s tattered relations with other NATO heads of state, Black Alliance for Peace national organizer Ajamu Baraka says the disarray in the western alliance is a “good thing.” NATO “now serves as a deployment force in every part of the world to extend and expand and deepen” the alliances military control. NATO has “proven itself to be an enemy of collective humanity,” said Baraka.
Labor:
Economy:
Congress Held a Hearing on the Fed’s Bailout of the Repo Market: Here’s Why You Haven’t Heard About ItLast Thursday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was the sole witness called before the House Financial Services Committee to answer questions on the state of financial stability in the U.S. Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the U.S. Treasury Secretary also heads the Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC) which is charged with monitoring any threats to the stability of the U.S. financial system in order to prevent a replay of the epic financial crash of 2008 and attendant devastation to the U.S. economy. During the hearing, Mnuchin was grilled time and again by numerous Republicans and Democrats on what is necessitating the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed) to be pumping out hundreds of billions of dollars per week to Wall Street trading houses via the repurchase agreement (repo loan) market. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Actress Louise Linton and Husband, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin Showing Off His Signature on U.S. Currency at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in 2017
World:
Thirst For Radical Change On Display As Corbyn Visits Wales With just days until voters go to the polls, Corbyn is touring the country in one last push for a Labour victory. His visit to Wales last weekend highlights the enormous enthusiasm that exists amongst workers and youth everywhere.As we have noted previously, the most important – and yet the most under-reported – story of this election has been the mass movement around Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’s bold manifesto to change society. Swathes of supporters have flooded the streets, participating in canvassing and rallies. This is no less true in Wales, which is experiencing a massive revival in support for the Labour Party.
Education, Health, Science, 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
Hitting at Cuban Doctors and at Human Solidarity. . . U.S. interference with Cuban medical assistance to other countries is part of its long campaign – joined by rightwing allies in Latin America – to undo the Cuban Revolution. It’s reasonable to assume that in looking for targets to hit, Cuba’s enemies would select aspects of Cuba’s revolution essential to its purpose or to its survival. Dedication to human solidarity has defined Cuba’s revolutionary movement from the start. Cuba has achieved superior indicators of health outcome at home and has responded to the health care needs of peoples abroad. These efforts, widely known and much admired, established Cuba as a model for the world in its practice of human solidarity. The doctors working abroad are highly visible agents of solidarity. They are joined by Cuban teachers, literacy specialists, sports experts, technicians, and engineers. By W. T. Whitney
During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three-Point Political Program: (1) Austerity, (2) Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and (3) The Iron Heel
Why Not Also Go With “The Kitchen Table” Impeachable Offenses for Removal? Will the Democrats move to impeach Trump for a narrow brace of violations and accept that the Senate Republicans will keep this outlaw in the White House? Or will they present the Senate with the President’s many proven impeachable offenses, thereby requiring the Senate Republicans, before live national television, in a public trial to defend Trump’s indefensible behavior?Let’s start with the signal statement by Trump: “Then I have Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” For almost three years, he has proceeded to engage in monarchical unconstitutional behavior in far more repeated, brazen ways than any preceding president. It is not even close. By Ralph Nader
Coal and the Regions Left Behind The NYT had an article that focused on Buchanan County, Virginia as an example of a left behind area in the United States. The county’s economy had centered on coal. While the discussion implies that its downturn is a recent story, the data presented in the piece shows that most of the decline occurred more than two decades ago. The county had more than 5,000 coal mining jobs in the early 1980s. This had fallen to just over 1,000 by the late 1990s. While there was some uptick in coal jobs from 2009 to 2013, the current level is not very different from the level of twenty years ago. By Dean Baker
