Images of the Day:
Since World War I, ‘the war to end all wars’, there have been perpetual wars for perpetual peace, this Laura Gray’s cartoon from the front page of The Militant August 18, 1945, Under the Banner Headline: “There Is No Peace”
Capitalism as a Failed System: World Capitalism Has Been Aware of the Comming Catastrophe of Global Warming Over 5 Decades Ago and Did Nothing!: Under Capitalism — Human Lives Don’t Matter Capitalism Does Not, and Never Has, Worked for the Masses! In Its Death Agony, Capitalism Is Traveling About The World Like The Four Horsemen of the The Apocalypse, Spreading Racism, War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. The very future of Humanity Is Now At stake!
During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three-Point Political Program: Austerity, Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and The Iron Heel! For Decades, Blacks Have Been Subjected to The Iron Heel! Currently, the US Capitalist Class is Divided Over When — Not If, to Apply It to Everyone! Globaly, With the Current Gaza War, The Right of Assembly is Under Attack! Due to Years of Austerity, Cuts to Public Health Care, And An Anti-Science and Profiteering President, The United States Still Leads the World In Coronavirus Cases and Deaths in the World!
The Majority of the World, Despite the Media Monopoly’s Lies, are Opposed to the Palestinian Genocide and Global Warming — The 1% Minority Funds Them! At, this Time in History, Capitalism is Exposing the Fact That it is Opposed to Majority Rule/Democracy!
Always Remember: That President Obama, With a Majority Democrat Legislature Supported the Wall Street Bailout and Remember, That he 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, that the 99% Will Rule, Not the Few!
Quotes of the Day:
The Ultimate Logic of Racism is Genocide!: Hitler was a sick and tragic man who carried racism to its logical conclusion, and he ended up leading a nation to the point of killing about six million Jews. And this is a tragedy of racism because its ultimate logic is genocide. If one says that I am not good enough to live next door to him, if one says that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, to have a good, decent job or to go to school with him, merely because of my race, he is saying, consciously or unconsciously, that I do not deserve to exist. To use a philosophical analogy here, racism is not based on some empirical generalization. It is based, rather, on an ontological affirmation. It is not the assertion that certain people are behind, culturally or otherwise, because of environmental conditions. It is the affirmation that the very being of a people is inferior. And this is a great tragedy of it. I say that however unpleasant it is, we must honestly see and admit that racism is still deeply rooted all over America. It’s still deeply rooted in the North, and it’s still deeply rooted in the South. — The Other America Speech Transcript – Martin Luther King Jr.
The recent Congressional hearings leading to a bloodbath of university presidents brings back memories from my teen-age years in the 1950s when everyone’s eyes were glued to the TV broadcast of the McCarthy hearings. And the student revolts incited by vicious college presidents trying to stifle academic freedom when it opposes foreign unjust wars awakens memories of the 1960s protests against the Vietnam War and the campus clampdowns confronting police violence. … Netanyahu characterized the U.S. protests in an extremist speech on April 24 attacking American academic freedom. What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel, they attack Jewish students, they attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. We see this exponential rise of antisemitism throughout America and throughout Western societies as Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists, genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians. It’s unconscionable, it has to be stopped, it has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally. But that’s not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now, fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done. This is a call to make American universities into arms of a police state, imposing policies dictated by Israel’s settler state. That call is being funded by a circular flow: Congress gives enormous subsidies to Israel, which recycles some of this money back into the election campaigns of politicians willing to serve their donors. It is the same policy that Ukraine uses when it employs U.S. “aid” by setting up well-funded lobbying organizations to back client politicians. — Universities as Tentacles of the Police State
But what we learned in the 1960s was that schools were also hotbeds of hypocrisy. That was the source of much of the campus unrest and protest in the 1960s. Instead of fixing the hypocrisy, living up to their values, and respecting student demands, higher education turned corporate. Over a fifty year period schools thought they had learned how to address the dissent on campus. They adopted even more of a corporate structure, seeking a top down mechanism for trying to control curriculum, faculty, and students. They adopted speech and civility codes as a way not to encourage debate but as a tool to discourage views that they do not want to hear. The corporate university turned itself into a private good, forcing students to borrow tens of thousands of dollars and thereby discipline their behavior by the demands of the economic marketplace. Moreover, the corporate university created its own problem by not being neutral when it came to a diversity of viewpoints, favoring some as opposed to others. It created not a tolerance but an intolerance of certain types of speech. Moreover, as universities have become even more corporate they have built lofty endowments whose investments are oftentimes questionable and which gives donors outsized influence upon what administrators and professors can do. — Campus Protests and the Corporate University
Pocasts/Videos of the Day:
United States:
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. Tax the Rich! — They Can Afford ford To Pay! Both Parties Support U.S. Capitalism’s Wars! (The Only War the Democrats Opposed was the Civil War!)
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. — Louis D. Brandeis Quotes
The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. MLK, Beyond Vietnam
Army Logic, if you are a veteran of the Vietnam wars it is easy to receive benefits, but not if you were exposed in the United States!:
Today, veterans who receive financial assistance as a result of Agent Orange connected medical issues generally get their compensation in the form of disability benefits. Single veterans are eligible for up to $39,984 per year as of 2022, while married veterans or those with dependents are eligible for $42,214 or more . . . You can become eligible for compensation for Agent Orange exposure if you have a record of specific types of military service. For example, if you served in Vietnam between January 9, 1962 and May 7,1975 or on a ship in inland waters or within 12 miles of Vietnamese or Cambodian demarcation lines, you are presumed to have been exposed to Agent Orange. So, if you have one of the medical conditions mentioned above that are linked to the chemical, you should be entitled to VA disability benefit. — Average Compensation for Agent Orange (2024 Guide)
Veterans Exposed to Agent Orange in the U.S. Await Compensation While the U.S. military used the herbicide to defoliate the jungles of Southeast Asia, it sprayed the same chemicals to kill poison oak and other weeds in northern California. As a young GI at Fort Ord in Monterey County, California, Dean Osborn spent much of his time in the oceanside woodlands, training on soil and guzzling water from streams and aquifers now known to be contaminated with cancer-causing pollutants. “They were marching the snot out of us,” he said, recalling his year and a half stationed on the base, from 1979 to 1980. He also remembers, not so fondly, the poison oak pervasive across the 28,000-acre installation that closed in 1994. He went on sick call at least three times because of the overwhelmingly itchy rash. Mounting evidence shows that as far back as the 1950s, in an effort to kill the ubiquitous poison oak and other weeds at the Army base, the military experimented with and sprayed the powerful herbicide combination known colloquially as Agent Orange. While the U.S. military used the herbicide to defoliate the dense jungles of Vietnam and adjoining countries, it was contaminating the land and waters of coastal California with the same chemicals, according to documents.
Biden Must Recognize All Student Debt as Hardship. It’s the Key Step to Relief. The Department of Education is making debt relief contingent on proof of “hardship,” but the debt itself is hardship. President Joe Biden is making headway in canceling student debt, despite a right-wing Supreme Court that struck down his initial plan to cancel up to $400 billion in student debt last year. Although his Plan A used the HEROES Act of 2003, the Biden administration has since used the Higher Education Act of 1965 to administer $138 billion in relief. Most of this relief has come as fixes to existing programs like Public Student Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), which historically denied more than 90 percent of eligible borrowers. Overall, Biden has canceled more student debt than any other president. But the Higher Education Act also gives the secretary of education the authority to immediately compromise, waive or settle all federal student debt, so why not use this power to its full extent?
Being Jewish In a Time of Mass Hysteria The “never again” faction loudly worries that Palestinian liberation is incompatible with Israeli survival and sees growing American antisemitism behind every picket sign. But support for Netanyahu and his government contradicts everything valuable in Jewish tradition and divides Jews from their historic allies in this country and worldwide.
US Reportedly Working to Stop ICC From Issuing Arrest Warrant for Netanyahu “There is absolutely no reason for Biden to be involved in this,” said one analyst. “But once again, Biden steps in to protect Netanyahu from the consequences of the war crimes he commits.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly growing increasingly concerned that the International Criminal Court is preparing to issue arrest warrants for him and other top government officials for committing war crimes in the Gaza Strip.The Times of Israelreported Sunday that the Israeli government, in partnership with the U.S., is “making a concerted effort to head off” possible arrest warrants from the ICC, which first launched its war crimes investigation in the occupied Palestinian territories in 2021.
U.S. Funded Plestinian Genocide:
Disgust Greets White House Correspondents’ Dinner as Israel Kills Journalists in Gaza “To sit and schmooze with the president while he sends billions of dollars in weapons to Israel to kill their colleagues in Gaza is unethical and immoral.” On Saturday night, U.S. reporters and government officials—including President Joe Biden—will gather at the Washington Hilton Hotel for the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a glitzy, humor-filled affair that has faced mounting boycott calls in recent weeks as Palestinian journalists in Gaza are targeted and killed by the Israeli military in appalling numbers. Earlier this month, dozens of Palestinian journal-ists urged their American colleagues to spurn the invite-only event “as an act of solidarity with us—your fellow journalists—as well as with the millions of Palestinians currently being starved in Gaza due to the Biden administration’s continued political, financial, and military backing of Israel.”
The World Concludes that Israeli Lies Smeared the Main Aid Agency Helping Starving Palestinians as “Terrorists” The Israeli authorities, in their campaign of remorseless killing, doctoring and adjusting the numbers of the Palestinian populace for whatever future awaits, have been found wanting on accusations that Hamas terrorists packed, stacked and filled UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East).
Environment:
Fund Climate! — Not Genocide! One of Many Ways to Begin to End Global Warming: Expose ‘Greenwashing’ — Tax the Polluters 100%! After World War II Rosa Luxenburg Coined the Slogan: ‘S0cialism or Barbaism’! Now the Slogan Should Be: ‘Ecosocialism or Ecocide’!
Capitalism’s Wars for Oil: When Bodies Start Stacking Up From Climate Change-Related Disasters, Will These Monsters be Held to Account?
Degrowth: Avoiding Eco-Collapse Something must be up. Otherwise, why would scientists keep sending us those scary warnings? There has been a steady stream of them in the past few years, including “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency” (signed by 15,000 of them), “Scientists’ Warning Against the Society of Waste,” “Scientists’ Warning of an Imperiled Ocean,” “Scientists’ Warning on Technology,” “Scientists’ Warning on Affluence,” “Climate Change and the Threat to Civilization,” and even “The Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.”
Your Food Could Have 10 Times as Much of This Toxic Pesticide Under New Proposal The EPA is relying on industry-backed tests to relax regulations on acephate, linked to neurodevelopmental disorders. When you bite into a piece of celery, there’s a fair chance that it will be coated with a thin film of a toxic pesticide called acephate. The bug killer — also used on tomatoes, cranberries, Brussels sprouts and other fruits and vegetables — belongs to a class of compounds linked to autism, hyperactivity and reduced scores on intelligence tests in children. But rather than banning the pesticide, as the European Union did more than 20 years ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed easing restrictions on acephate.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
United States: UAW Victory at Volkswagen! Organize the Unorganized! Last week, workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted to join the United Auto Workers (UAW). The overwhelming result—2,628 to 985—is the UAW’s first success at a foreign-owned automaker in the South. UAW President Shawn Fain called it “the first domino to fall” in the union’s campaign to organize 13 companies including Tesla, BMW, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, and Hyundai. The next target is a Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama where 5,200 workers will vote May 13–17.United States: UAW Victory at Volkswagen! Organize the Unorganized! Last week, workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted to join the United Auto Workers (UAW). The overwhelming result—2,628 to 985—is the UAW’s first success at a foreign-owned automaker in the South. UAW President Shawn Fain called it “the first domino to fall” in the union’s campaign to organize 13 companies including Tesla, BMW, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, and Hyundai. The next target is a Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama where 5,200 workers will vote May 13–17.
Labor:Economy:
Why I Celebrate May Day But I Do Not Celebrate Labor Day! By RolandSheppard Retired Business Agent Painters Local # 4 San Francisco I celebrate May Day, but I don’t celebrate Labor Day — I just observe it. To me, Labor Day means the codification of the labor bureaucracy’s subservience to the capitalist class. That was the original purpose for the United States capitalist class when it made labor day a holiday. It was organized as such in opposition to the Labor Day that was/is celebrated everywhere else in the world — a demonstration class solidarity! — May Day! May Day was celebrated, in memory of the martyrs of the Haymarket Massacre in 1886 Chicago, for the eight hour day, and the unending struggle of the world working class for their “unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Economy:
JPMorgan Remains the Second Largest Money Market Fund Manager, Despite Needing Billions in Money Market Bailouts from the Fed in 2020 The Office of Financial Research (OFR), the federal agency created after the financial crash of 2008 to keep federal banking regulators on top of threats to financial stability, has posted an interactive chart showing the largest managers of Money Market Mutual Funds in the U.S. Alarmingly, the parent of the largest and riskiest bank in the United States – JPMorgan Chase – is also the second largest Money Market Mutual Fund manager.
World:
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, pass universal healthcare for themselves, but cannot spend even one trillion dollars for universal health for those who are ‘governed’! This is what is considered, by the powers to be, a democracy and part of the democratic way. — Roland Sheppard, Let the People Vote on Healthcare