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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 1% Who Profit From Austerity! Under Austerity, All of the World Will Eventually Be Pauperized, Humbled, and Desecrated Like Greece and Puerto Rico
February is Black History Month
Images and Quotes of the Dayof the Day:
The Question How Can the Stock Market Be at an all time high, since 2009, while the Gross National Product has basically remained at the same as the its 2009 level? See Shadow Government Statistics — Commentary No. 879, April 7, 2017. The answer is simple. The Capitalist, due to the treachery of the trade union bureaucracy, which states openly that it is ‘in partneship’ with capitalism, have been able to steal the working class’s share of the surplus valve that they produce. And through dividends, buyback, and reinvesting in their own stocks. Thus, the rise in the stock market reflect the rise in profits, but not through any value produced. — Robber Baron Usury Capitalism in the United States
The only real alternative to the paper illusion of Capitalist prosperity, is the socialist solution. — To act collectively, in our overall interests for our survival as a species, to correct the problem and to remove the obstacle of capitalism. It requires a society where humanity has social, economic, and political control over the entire environment. Such a society, a socialist society, is needed to ensure that all decisions affecting the environment are under the democratic control of humankind so that the production of goods will be done for the needs and survival of planet and humanity instead of the production and the destruction of humanity and other species for profit. — Robber Baron Usury Capitalism in the United States
Just before the 2000 Presidential Election, in September 2000, George Bush’s think tank, The Project for the New American Century, put into writing a document titled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, Forces and Resources For a New Century. In that document they called for war upon Iraq, a US military presence in the middle east, and the construction of military bases throughout Asia and the world to enforce, what they termed, as a ‘strategic goal’, the preservation Pax Americana — the ‘new world order’ that was proclaimed after the first Gulf War. There has been no objection or opposition, from the Democratic Party, to this ‘strategic goal’ for this century, even though the document stated, two years prior to 9/11: Today its task is to secure and expand the “zones of democratic peace;” to deter the rise of a new great power competitor; defend key regions of Europe, East Asia and the Middle East; and to preserve American preeminence through the coming transformation of war made possible by new technologies. In its founding principles, the Project for the New American Century proposed preventive strikes:Of course, the United States must be prudent in how it exercises its power. But we cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of global leadership of the costs that are associated with its exercise. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. (And Obama, following this policy, established 35 military bases in Africa. — R.S.) If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests. The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire. The history of the past century should have taught us, to embrace the cause of American leadership. (My Emphasis) — Pax Americana and The Failure of ‘Lesser Evilism’
Videos of the Day:
U.S.:
Here I want to examine a different question: how does the Insane Clown President get to keep his position atop Superpower despite his epic unpopularity and his obvious and shameful unfitness (see Michael Wolff’s surprisingly masterful book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House) for any complex and demanding job? Part of the answer lay in the deeply undemocratic nature of the United States; political institutions, a reflection to no small extent of the nation’s enduring captivity to the intentionally anti-democratic and wildly anachronistic Constitution crafted by the nation’s slave-owning and powdered-wig wearing Founders to protect the propertied “elite” from the property-less and property-poor majority in 1788, when the Bourbon dynasty still reigned in France.
Confronted with a national government as stupid, loathed and dangerous as the Republican-led one in Washington right now, citizens and leaders in any reasonable parliamentary democracy today would conclude that the head of state had failed to create a functional governing coalition. They would call quite sensibly for new national elections. Here in the U.S, however, demanding new elections marks you as a lunatic. The sacred 1788 charter mandates that qualified voters go to the polls to select presidents (well, Electoral College representatives) once every four years, national senators once every six years, and House representatives, once every two years. As George W. Bush’s White House spokesperson Dana Perino explained in March of 2008 when asked if the citizenry should have “input” on U.S. foreign policy: “You had your input. The American people have input every four years, and that’s the way our system is set up.”
Perino was on all-too-strong constitutional ground. Never mind that U.S.-Americans don’t select the president by majority popular vote (more on that below) or that the only two viable major-party presidential candidates on offer to We the People once every four years are always both committed to the same corporate and military state most of the populace hates. Forget that that U.S. presidential campaigns usually revolve around candidate-centered differences of image, “character,” and branding, not substantive maters of policy. The fact remains that the Holy Constitution says that the populace gets to vote for a U.S. president in a voting booth for two minutes or so once every 1,460 days. That’s your “input,” peon. Don’t like it? Too bad. Constitution Says! Go live in North Korea! — Paul Street, We the People, Trumped by Constitution and Capitalism
Fraud, Corruption, and Disaster Capitalism in Puerto Rico: The Trump team was just caught in a $156 million Puerto Rico food contract scandal The Trump administration’s naked exploitation of the devastation wrought on the island of Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria was exposed in bewildering fashion when it was revealed that a Trump administration contractor was awarded $156 million to provide 30 million meals to the people of Puerto Rico – and only came through with 50,000 meals. By Colin Taylor
‘Shame’: In Dead-of-Night Vote, Congress Throws Dreamers Under the Bus Again “This bill does not address the great moral issue of our time — the fact that in three weeks 800,000 young Dreamers will lose their legal status and be subject to deportation.” With hundreds of Dreamers losing legal protections each day and thousands more set to be vulnerable to deportation in just over three weeks, Democrats and Republicans joined hands on Friday to ram through a two-year budget measure that lifted spending caps, dumped more funds into the Pentagon’s overflowing coffers, and left nearly a million young immigrants in “unacceptable limbo.” By Jake Johnson 
The US Plan to Partition Syria During a Jan. 17 Stanford University speech, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that the U.S. military will arm, train, finance, and otherwise support—for an indefinite time—a new, 30,000-strong, Kurdish and U.S.-allied Arab nation border force in northeastern Syria. This force in formation, effectively aimed at the partition of Syria, will be backed by at least 5000 U.S. troops installed in the three new and permanent U.S. military bases in Syria. Thousands more troops are stationed on U.S. aircraft carriers and other war ships off Syria’s Mediterranean coast, while thousands more operate from the major U.S. Air force base in Qatar. Tiller son’s partition speech was a first for a top Trump or Obama administration official. But this former Exxon-Mobile chief essentially stated what U.S. policy has been since 2011 when the Syrian government’s attack on largely peaceful protesters demanding democratic rights and aid for drought-stricken farmers inadvertently provided the U.S. with a pretext for the now seven-year U.S.-orchestrated regime-change imperialist war that has cost the lives of some 500,000 Syrians and displaced nearly half the population. by Jeff Mackler
Environment:
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:
Labor:
Women’s Strikes Are a Reminder That Women Produce Most of the Wealth in Society Today we bring you a conversation with Cinzia Arruzza and Tithi Bhattacharya, two national organizers for the International Women’s Strike. They discuss how the labor movement is inherently connected to the #MeToo movement and how women globally are preparing for another women’s strike on March 8. By Sarah Jaffe. 
Lack of migrant workers left food rotting in UK fields last year, data reveals Exclusive: Brexit fears and falling pound left fruit and vegetable farms short of more than 4,000 workers, with senior MPs warning of a ‘crisis’ Fruit and vegetable farms across the UK were left short of thousands of migrant workers in 2017, leaving some produce to rot in the fields and farmers suffering big losses. By Damian Carrington
Economy:
Is the Stock Market Rigged? On February 6 PCR asked if the Plunge Protection Team had stepped in and prevented a stock market correction by purchasing equity index futures. Sure enough, the daily exchange volume chart shows an increase in futures activity on February 2 with sharp increases on Feb. 5th and 6th. Those are the days when the stock market averages were experiencing large point drops. So, ask yourself, would you purchase equity futures while experiencing cumulative stock market drops? One can understand shorting a dropping market, but not buying futures.Unless this is what happened. Seeing the beginning of a correction, the Plunge Protection Team placed a futures bid just below the existing price. Traders saw the bid, recognized that the government was intervening to support the market, and the bid was front-run with the hedge fund algorithms automatically picking up the action. Who but the Federal Reserve with its unlimited ability to create money would take the risk of buying futures in the face of a falling market. Moreover, such an infusion of money into the market does not show up in the money supply figures. By Paul Craig Roberts, Dave Kranzler, and Michael Hudson
Yesterday’s Stock Market Plunge Saw Indiscriminate Dumping of Stocks By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Typically, in a market panic, one would expect the Nasdaq to show a deeper dive than the Dow. But as the top chart above indicates, on Monday and Tuesday it was actually the Dow that saw a deeper selloff. Then yesterday, Thursday, February 8, the two widely disparate markets traded in almost complete lockstep. (See second chart above.) Why would a far riskier market trade in lockstep with the far safer Dow during a market panic? Surely memories are not so short that they can’t recall how the Nasdaq fared versus the Dow in the dot.com bust that began in March 2000. (See third chart above.) World: By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
The Soviet Union emerged from the October Revolution as a workers’ state. State ownership of the means of production, a necessary prerequisite to socialist development, opened up the possibility of a rapid growth of the productive forces. But the apparatus of the workers’ state underwent a complete degeneration at the same time: It was transformed from a weapon of the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class and more and more a weapon for the sabotage of the country’s economy. . . . The bureaucratization of a backward and isolated workers’ state and the transformation of the bureaucracy into an all- powerful privileged cast constitute the most convincing refutation—not only theoretically but this time practically—of the theory of socialism in one country. The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a degenerated workers’ state. Such is the social diagnosis. The political prognosis has an alternative character: Either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism. . . .
Russia: How the Bureaucracy Seized Power ‒ part four: the bureaucratic counter-revolution In the fourth and concluding part of George Collins’ history of the rise of Stalinism, he explains the bureaucracy’s final victory over Trotsky’s Left Opposition; their shameful co-operation with fascism and imperialism; and the brutal, counter-revolutionary role they played in suppressing the working class in Russia and internationally. He concludes with an optimistic assessment of the political situation in Russia in the late-80s, and while we now know the tragic reality of what happened after the Soviet Union collapsed, a new revolutionary current has now gripped the minds of workers and youth worldwide. By George Collins
