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During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three Point Political Program: 1. Austerity, 2. Scapegoating Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal Immigrants’ for Unemployment, and 3. The Iron Heel.
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 Who Profit From Austerity! Under Austerity, All of the World Will Eventually Be Pauperized, Humbled, and Desecrated Like Greece and Puerto Rico
Images of the Day:
Quote of The Day:
President Trump wants to set the regulatory clock back to 1960, and last week he acted it out for the cameras. Wielding a pair of golden scissors at a White House photo op, he cut red tape strung around two stacks of paper. One was a small pile of some 20,000 pages representing the amount of regulations in 1960; the other a mound of more than 185,000 pages representing those of today. “We’re getting back below the 1960 level,” Trump declared, “and we’ll be there fairly quickly.” There’s only one problem. That mountain of paper Trump used as a prop symbolizes hard-won measures that protect us. To refresh the president’s memory, back in the 1960s, smog in major U.S. cities was so thick it blocked the sun. Rivers ran brown with raw sewage and toxic chemicals. Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River and at least two other urban waterways were so polluted they caught on fire. Lead-laced paint and gasoline poisoned children, damaging their brains and nervous systems. Cars without seatbelts, airbags or safety glass were unsafe at any speed. And hazardous working conditions killed an average of 14,000 workers annually, nearly three times the number today. In response, Congress enacted the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act and other landmark pieces of legislation to protect public health and safety. Some of those laws also created the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Highway Traffic Safety Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and other federal agencies to write and enforce safeguards. None of those laws, or the regulations they spawned, existed in 1960. Trump should remember quite well what it was like in the 1960s. After all, he lived in New York, at the time one of the dirtiest cities in the country. Garbage incinerators routinely rained ash on city streets, while coal- and oil-fired power plants spewed a noxious mix of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and toxic metals. John V. Lindsay, the city’s mayor from 1966 to 1973, famously quipped, “I never trust air I can’t see,” but it was no laughing matter. On Thanksgiving weekend the year Lindsay took office, the smog was so bad it killed some 200 people. The waterways coursing around the city’s boroughs, especially the Hudson River, were just as filthy. In 1965, then-New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller accurately called the Hudson “one great septic tank.” Indeed, 170 million gallons of raw sewage fouled the river daily while factories along its banks treated it as a waste pit. A General Motors plant in Sleepy Hollow, 27 miles north of New York City, poured its paint sludge directly into the river. Even worse, General Electric manufacturing plants in Fort Edwards and Hudson Falls dumped about 1.3 million pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a probable human carcinogen, into the river over a 30-year period ending in 1977. Since 1984, a 200-mile stretch of the river from Hudson Falls to Manhattan’s southern tip has been on the EPA’s Superfund program list of the country’s most hazardous waste sites. — Trump Vows to Kill 50 Years of Federal Health and Safety Protections
Videos of the Day:
Catalan Separatists Defy Obstacles to Win Parliament Majority Catalan independence parties won the regional parliamentary vote, defeating the central government’s effort to weaken the movement, but the parties will have a difficult time forming a government, explains Prof. Sebastiaan Faber of Oberlin College
California Wild Fire Becomes Largest Ever Recorded As 2017 marks a new benchmark for climate-change related U.S. disasters, FEMA director tells Americans they “will have to take care of themselves” when disasters strike.
World Bank and World’s Third Largest Insurer Divest from Most Oil and Gas “The fact that they are making this commitment, to not be financing upstream oil and gas after 2019 is a pretty strong vote of non-confidence in the future of the oil and gas industry,” says Alex Speers-Roesch of Greenpeace Canada
U.S.:
Rape and Money Laundering — No Penalties Under Trump’s 1% First Policies Policies: Trump and the Meat Tycoon: Backstory to a Commutation After he served 8 years of a 27-year sentence for money laundering, kosher meatpacking executive Sholom Rubashkin had his sentence commuted. On May 14, 2008, hundreds of officers from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) swooped down on Agriprocessors, the nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, with helicopters in the largest single-site raid in US history, arresting half of the eight-hundred-person workforce. Two hundred and ninety Guatemalans, ninety-three Mexicans, two Israelis, and four Ukrainians were marched off to a waiting phalanx of buses and vans and a makeshift detention center. by Martha Rosenberg
Trump of New Tax Law — More Plunder by the 99%: Trump ‘tells wealthy friends after passing tax bill’: ‘You all just got a lot richer’ Analysts say President may be $15m personally better off Hours after signing a sweeping tax bill that independent analysts say will most benefit corporations and wealthy Americans, Donald Trump reportedly told friends at his private Florida club: “You all just got a lot richer.” The White House has claimed the tax bill Mr Trump signed into law on Friday, the biggest overhaul of the system since 1986 and his first major legislative accomplishment, would help all Americans, even though independent analysts say the wealthiest will benefit the most. By Andrew Buncombe
Environment:
Humidity May Prove Breaking Point for Some Areas as Temperatures Rise, Says Study From U.S. South to China, Heat Stress Could Exceed Human Endurance Climate scientists say that killer heat waves will become increasingly prevalent in many regions as climate warms. However, most projections leave out a major factor that could worsen things: humidity, which can greatly magnify the effects of heat alone. Now, a new global study projects that in coming decades the effects of high humidity in many areas will dramatically increase. At times, they may surpass humans’ ability to work or, in some cases, even survive. Health and economies would suffer, especially in regions where people work outside and have little access to air conditioning. Potentially affected regions include large swaths of the already muggy southeastern United States, the Amazon, western and central Africa, southern areas of the Mideast and Arabian peninsula, northern India and eastern China by Kevin Krajick
From Presents Wrapped-Up for Polluters & Nuclear Profiteers: Federal Christmas presents are being lavished on toxic polluters, arms merchants, billionaires, and their Congressional lap dogs, while, as Zappa said, the meek shall inherit nothing. As if pollution and graft made the country great, the Trump administration, with help from Democrats, has been on a regulation-cancelling rampage, repealing rules on environmental protection, health care, financial services, and even internet accessibility. As of Dec. 15, Mr. Trump’s government-by-corporations had revoked 67 rules, withdrawn 635 planned regulations, declared 244 laws “inactive,” and “delayed” 700 others. In Minnesota, US Rep. Rick Nolan, D-Crosby, managed to giftwrap for a foreign mining company the cancellation of an environmental study of mining in the watershed of the famed Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The US Forest Service had been examining the environmental risks of several large mining proposals near the BWCA. The giant Antofagasta Corporation from Chile wants to dig a massive underground copper mine southeast of Ely near the Kawishiwi River which flows directly into and through the protected boundary waters. If the study had a chance of finding little risk of permanent mine pollution, Nolan and the billionaire Chileans would have allowed it to proceed. But copper mines always wreck surface and groundwater, so mine proponents zeroed out the study, and, voila, its absence makes the plan look as clean as hell. . . . Meanwhile, the Republicans’ October budget provides nuclear weapons planners and builders with hundreds of billions, while gouging $1 trillion from Medicaid and nearly $500 billion from Medicare. The government intends to spend about $40 billion every year for nine years on nuclear weapons programs, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s report “Projected Costs of US Nuclear Forces, 2017 to 2026.” Plans put forward by the Pentagon and the Energy Department would cost $400 billion over this period. These estimates include the projected costs of new weapons that aren’t yet approved. Funds for a new long-range, land-based missile to replace today’s 450 have not been appropriated (and high-ranking military and civilian authorities have publicly attacked the plan saying they should be abolished, not replaced). The Long-range Stand Off missile — a nuclear-armed Cruise missile — has also been called unnecessary and destabilizing by former Secretaries of Defense and other experts. Still, both systems are expected by the CBO to see development take off in the coming years.
2017 in Photos: Capturing the Causes and Impacts of Climate Change The year 2017 was, in many ways, stormy. It brought more storms super-sized due to global warming and more people, including scientists, taking to the streets in response to the political climate. This year for DeSmog I continued documenting a range of issues related to climate change, from extreme weather enhanced by it to the expanding industrial landscape contributing to it. This year I shot the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a storm researchers have shown was intensified by climate change, and the protests of people determined to protect the environment — a renewed movement kicked off with the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., following Trump’s inauguration. In the mix I captured moments in the battle against Energy Transfer Partners’ Bayou Bridge pipeline, which only last week secured its last permit before construction can begin in Louisiana, and events in the ongoing struggle for clean air in the communities of Louisiana’s Cancer Alley. I’ve included photos taken in West Virginia and Ohio of coal power plants, a visual reminder of the need to transition to clean energy and the people living in the shadow of an industry in decline, despite President Trump’s promise to revive it. Also in the mix you’ll find documentation of the slow recovery for victims of last year’s record-breaking floods in Louisiana. By Julie Dermansky
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:
Labor:
Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man’s made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that’s a-weak and a back that’s strong
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store
A Nation Without Pensions? The elimination of pensions has been the dream of corporations for decades. Towards that goal, they fight to break unions and any other organized voice for working people. The Washington Post tracked the lives of the 998 workers who were laid off when McDonnell Douglas closed its plant in Tulsa in 1994.They lost their pension benefits. Most can never stop working because Social Security is not enough to live in. I hope this story is not behind a paywall. Let me know if it is. “TULSA — Tom Coomer has retired twice: once when he was 65, and then several years ago. Each time he realized that with just a Social Security check, “You can hardly make it these days.” So here he is at 79, working full time at Walmart. During each eight-hour shift, he stands at the store entrance greeting customers, telling a joke and fetching a “buggy.” Or he is stationed at the exit, checking receipts and the shoppers that trip the theft alarm. By Diane Ravitch
Economy:
Real GDP (1970 – 2017), Third – Estimate of Third – Quarter 2017
Despite Record Levels, the Stock Market Is Actually Shrinking in Size Like that box of macaroni in your kitchen cupboard, the U.S. stock market has become a lot more expensive but has actually shrunk in terms of quantity. In 1975, U.S. domestic companies that traded on U.S. exchanges totaled 4,819. Forty years later, the market has shrunk to less than 4,000, despite a tripling in GDP. By pam Martens and Russ Martens
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
The Electrical Abuse of Women: Does Anyone Care? Many Americans are unaware that electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)—more commonly known as electroshock—continues to be widely utilized by U.S. psychiatry. In the current issue of the journal Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, psychologist John Read and co-author Chelsea Arnold note, “The archetypal ECT recipient remains, as it has for decades, a distressed woman more than 50 years old.” by Bruce E. Levine 
