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%!
emocracy?: 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!
It’s becoming clear that the reason so many Americans have their pockets picked by Wall Street scam artists year after year is that mainstream media simply won’t put the dangers of dealing with the mega Wall Street banks on their front pages. Yesterday’s Senate Banking hearing is yet one more example of mainstream media failing the interests of the American people. — Pam Martens and Russ Martens
After the Disclosure of the Afghanistan Papers: Progressives Rebel as House Hands Trump War Spending Package The House voted 377-48 to advance a $738 billion military spending authorization package on Wednesday despite a rebellion among progressive Democrats angered by the loss of provisions that would have curtailed endless wars and put President Trump’s most violent foreign policy ambitions in check. BY Mike Ludwig
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 Issue-Less Impeachment: The Corporate Democrats Stand for Nothing, So They Impeach for Nothing The corporate Democrats are effectively exonerating themselves and their Republican brethren of the full spectrum of lawlessness that is everyday politics in the belly of the racist, imperial beast. “The Democrats have used the vile, childishly compulsive and overtly racist Trump as a straw man ever since he announced for the 2016 presidential race.” The impeachment of Donald Trump has nothing to do with social justice at home and abroad, global environmental stability, or the rule of law anywhere on the planet. Rather, the corporate Democrats have methodically narrowed the scope of the indictment to exclude all the actual crimes of this president against humanity, peace, the environment and the rule of law – for the obvious reason that both corporate parties and all modern U.S. presidents are collectively and individually guilty. In limiting the indictment to Trump’s attempted political extortion of Ukraine for the purpose of influencing a U.S. election – a laughable charge, since the Kiev regime is the creature of the U.S. (Democratic) engineered overthrow of the previous, elected Ukraine government – the Democrats are effectively exonerating themselves and their Republican brethren of the full spectrum of lawlessness that is everyday politics in the belly of the racist, imperial beast. By Glen Ford , Black Agenda Report Executive editor
The Media Monopoly Promotes Wars: The U.S. Government Lied about the Afghanistan War, They Couldn’t Have Done It Without Media Lapdogs “In ten years or so, we’ll leak the truth,” the Dead Kennedys sang. “But by then it’s only so much paper.” But it might just score you a Pulitzer Prize.Award bait and bragging rights are no doubt the principal goals of The Washington Post’s self-congratulatory data dump, “The Afghanistan Papers.” As the headline implies, the 2000 pages that a court-ordered the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction to release to Jeff Bezos’ newspaper paints a Robert McNamara-esque portrait of not-so-best-or-bright Bush and Obama Administration bozos privately admitting what they knew all along—that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was always an unwinnable, counterproductive mistake—at the same time they were telling the American people that victory in the post-9/11 “good war” was right around the corner. All we had to win was win Afghan hearts and minds. By Ted Rall
30+ Groups Condemn ‘Obscene’ $738 Billion Pentagon Bill as Blank Check for War and ‘Gift to Donald Trump’ “Further inflating the Pentagon’s overstuffed coffers does not make us safer—it perpetuates a system that treats military intervention as the solution to all world problems.” —coalition “Every dollar spent by the Pentagon is a dollar not spent on education, healthcare, or climate. When critics attack social spending by asking ‘how will you pay for it?’ this will be our answer.” A diverse coalition of more than 30 progressive advocacy groups on Tuesday condemned the bipartisan, $738 billion National Defense Authorization Act as a “blank check” to the military-industrial complex that does nothing to restrain President Donald Trump’s reckless foreign policy.By Jake Johnson
‘Let’s Bring Rumsfeld In’: Khanna Calls for Hearings on US Officials Who Lied to American People About Endless Afghan War “The bottom line is that top military officials and civilian officials have known that the Afghan war has been has been unwinnable and have been misleading the American public for 20 years.” Rep. Ro Khanna on Wednesday said that TheWashington Post‘s explosive investigation the “Afghanistan Papers” showed the need for a congressional hearing and that former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld should be among the current and former top officials called in for a reckoning before the American public. By Andrea Germanos
PG&E Profiting From Deferred Maintenance: PG&E Diverted Millions From Putting Lines Underground, Audit Finds Over the course of 10 years, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. “consistently and significantly” shifted money away from efforts to bury power lines underground, likely causing such projects to take longer and cost more than they would have otherwise, according to a recently completed audit. PG&E diverted $123 million from 2007 through 2016 from a major program intended to help bury overhead electric lines, the review conducted for the California Public Utilities Commission found. The lower spending was not because the company found cheaper or more efficient ways of completing the efforts: Auditors concluded that PG&E was using the money for other things it deemed more important. By J.D. Morris
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Labor:
France: The ‘Socialist’ Labor Bureaucracy in Support of Captial: ‘The Government Presented Exactly The Same Reform That They Would Have Put Forward If None Of The “Talks” And “Consultations” Had Taken Place.”
France: The Conditions Of Victory: The speech delivered by Edouard Philippe (the Prime Minister) yesterday concluded over 18 months of “talks” and “consultations” with the leaders of the trade unions. Hundreds of hours of negotiation meetings culminated in this enlightening result: the government presented exactly the same reform that they would have put forward if none of the “talks” and “consultations” had taken place. For 18 months, the trade union leaders have been playing the role assigned to them by the government, in this circus of so-called social democracy. Their task has been to deceive the people, to convince the workers that the government is listening to them and taking their concerns into account, in order to reach a compromise. Instead of boycotting these negotiations and turning towards the workers to prepare for a massive struggle, the trade union leaders have played along with the circus. Philippe Martinez (the General Secretary of the CGT) has now declared that “the government has ridiculed the people”. But it is above all Martinez himself who is being ridiculed: after 23 consultation meetings, the government is accusing him of “not wanting to talk”. But who is to blame? The government, for organising this farce and defending the interests of the ruling class? Or the head of the CGT, for accepting to be complicit in it?
Economy:
Book Review: The Lie of Global Prosperity: How Neoliberals Distort Data to Mask Poverty and Exploitation “We’re making headway on global poverty,” trills billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates. “Decline of Global Extreme Poverty Continues,” reports the World Bank. And “How did the global poverty rate halve in 20 years?” inquires The Economist magazine. Seth Donnelly answers: “It didn’t!” In fact, according to Donnelly’s The Lie of Global Prosperity, virtually nothing about these glad tidings proclaiming plummeting global poverty rates is true. It’s just that trend-setting neoliberal experts and institutions need us to believe that global capitalism, now unfettered in the wake of the Cold War and bolstered by Information Technology, has ushered in a new phase of international human prosperity. This short book deconstructs the assumption that global poverty has fallen dramatically, and lays bare the spurious methods of poverty measurement and data on which the dominant prosperity narrative depends. Here is carefully researched documentation that global poverty—and the inequalities and misery that flourish within it—remains massive, afflicting the majority of the world’s population. Donnelly goes further to analyze just how global poverty, rather than being reduced, is actually reproduced by the imperatives of capital accumulation on a global scale. Just as the global, environmental catastrophe cannot be resolved within capitalism, rooted as it is in contemporary mechanisms of exploitation and plunder, neither can human poverty be effectively eliminated by neoliberal “advances.”The Cost of Living Raise That You Did Not Get — See How Much The Government Is Cheating Ecery Year By Their ‘Figureimg’ Of The Cost of LivingShadow Government StatistsAlternate Inflation Charts The CPI chart on the home page reflects our estimate of inflation for today as if it were calculated the same way it was in 1990. The CPI on the Alternate Data Series tab here reflects the CPI as if it were calculated using the methodologies in place in 1980. In general terms, methodological shifts in government reporting have depressed reported inflation, moving the concept of the CPI away from being a measure of the cost of living needed to maintain a constant standard of living.
Senators Give Explosive Critique of Wall Street’s Top Cop as Mainstream Media Yawns It’s becoming clear that the reason so many Americans have their pockets picked by Wall Street scam artists year after year is that mainstream media simply won’t put the dangers of dealing with the mega Wall Street banks on their front pages. Yesterday’s Senate Banking hearing is yet one more example of mainstream media failing the interests of the American people.At yesterday’s hearing, Senator after Senator probed the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, on what were clearly intentional failings to hold Wall Street accountable. The scathing rebukes of the SEC came from both Republican and Democrats on the Senate panel. But you will find no reports about that hearing on the front pages of newspapers today — or in any section of leading newspapers. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
This Will Go Down As A Dark Day For British DemocracyTonight’s result sets a precedent that you can lie, cheat and evade scrutiny and get away with it. This evening’s exit poll,revealed to the despair of many at 10pm, paints a disastrous picture of the British political landscape. If the projections are proved correct it will see Boris Johnson take a majority of 86 in the House of Commons, the biggest since Margaret Thatcher’s third victory leaving Labour with one of their worst results in modern times. It will see major issues such as climate change, the NHS and welfare swept under the carpet in exchange for a simple pledge to ‘Get Brexit Done’. It could also bring about significant boundary and constitutional changesthat will keep the Conservatives in power for the foreseeable future. This evening’s exit poll,revealed to the despair of many at 10pm, paints a disastrous picture of the British political landscape. If the projections are proved correct it will see Boris Johnson take a majority of 86 in the House of Commons, the biggest since Margaret Thatcher’s third victory leaving Labour with one of their worst results in modern times. It will see major issues such as climate change, the NHS and welfare swept under the carpet in exchange for a simple pledge to ‘Get Brexit Done’. It could also bring about significant boundary and constitutional changesthat will keep the Conservatives in power for the foreseeable future. By Jack Peat
“It’s Happening,” Declares Jeremy Corbyn as Early UK Election Reports Suggest “Longest Queues Ever” “These images of people queuing to vote will scare the death out of the Tories. Get up, get out, and let’s make history.” As Britons headed to the polls Thursday for the much-anticipated and highly consequential general election, U.K. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn sounded a note of optimism in response to early reports of big crowds and long lines at polling stations across the country. By Jake JohnsonBritain Could Be the First Domino in a Left-Wing Revolution Just like that, we’re hours away from the Dec. 12 U.K. general election that will decide the nation’s direction at a crucial time in its history and in the wider global context, what with the rise of the far-right in the West and the worsening climate crisis. Although U.K. political campaigns are happily much shorter than those in America, a lot has transpired over the course of the past month since a snap election was called by Boris Johnson. Several debates have taken place, one entirely dedicated to climate change in which an absent Johnson was replaced with a melting block of ice; an attack on London Bridge left several dead, including the attacker, and raised questions about the underfunding of police forces under conservative rule; and world leaders convened in London for a NATO meeting that led to more than a few embarrassing moments for Johnson, Donald Trump and others. By Natasha Hakimi Zapata
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
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
The Cost of Living Raise That You Did Not Get — See How Much The Government Is Cheating Ecery Year By Their ‘Figureimg’ Of The Cost of Living
Shadow Government StatistsAlternate Inflation Charts The CPI chart on the home page reflects our estimate of inflation for today as if it were calculated the same way it was in 1990. The CPI on the Alternate Data Series tab here reflects the CPI as if it were calculated using the methodologies in place in 1980. In general terms, methodological shifts in government reporting have depressed reported inflation, moving the concept of the CPI away from being a measure of the cost of living needed to maintain a constant standard of living.
