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.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Venezuela was an oil monoculture. Its export revenue was spent largely on importing food and other necessities that it could have produced at home. Its trade was largely with the United States. So despite its oil wealth, it ran up foreign debt. From the outset, U.S. oil companies have feared that Venezuela might someday use its oil revenues to benefit its overall population instead of letting the U.S. oil industry and its local comprador aristocracy siphon off its wealth. So the oil industry – backed by U.S. diplomacy – held Venezuela hostage in two ways. First of all, oil refineries were not built in Venezuela, but in Trinidad and in the southern U.S. Gulf Coast states. This enabled U.S. oil companies – or the U.S. Government – to leave Venezuela without a means of “going it alone” and pursuing an independent policy with its oil, as it needed to have this oil refined. It doesn’t help to have oil reserves if you are unable to get this oil refined so as to be usable. Second, Venezuela’s central bankers were persuaded to pledge their oil reserves and all assets of the state oil sector (including Citgo) as collateral for its foreign debt. This meant that if Venezuela defaulted (or was forced into default by U.S. banks refusing to make timely payment on its foreign debt), bondholders and U.S. oil majors would be in a legal position to take possession of Venezuelan oil assets. These pro-U.S. policies made Venezuela a typically polarized Latin American oligarchy. Despite being nominally rich in oil revenue, its wealth was concentrated in the hands of a pro-U.S. oligarchy that let its domestic development be steered by the World Bank and IMF. The indigenous population, especially its rural racial minority as well as the urban underclass, was excluded from sharing in the country’s oil wealth. The oligarchy’s arrogant refusal to share the wealth, or even to make Venezuela self-sufficient in essentials, made the election of Hugo Chavez a natural outcome. — Michael Hudson
President of Venezuela Doesn’t Have a Constitutional Leg to Stand OnDonald Trump imagines Juan Guaidó is the rightful president of Venezuela. Mr. Guaidó, a man of impeccable illegitimacy, was exposed by Cohen and Blumenthal as “a product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington’s elite regime change trainers.” Argentinian sociologist Marco Teruggi described Guaidó in the same article as “a character that has been created for this circumstance” of regime change. Here, his constitutional credentials to be interim president of Venezuela are deconstructed. By Roger Harris
The Great Con of American Patriotism American soldiers born decades apart in the state of New York, Ron Kovic and Maj. Danny Sjursen are two crucial dissenting voices that have experienced firsthand the futility and brutality of America’s interventionist wars. Kovic, a Marine veteran who was paralyzed in the Vietnam War, has spent the rest of his life fighting against the U.S. war machine. The film “Born on the Fourth of July,” starring Tom Cruise, was based on his book, a work he hoped would combine with his activism to dissuade young people from buying into the toxic patriotism that leads Americans to fight destructive, ultimately pointless wars. By Robert Scheer
Tom Cruise as Ron Kovic in “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989). (Universal Pictures)
USA: two trends in the American socialist movement – why we should throw Kautsky out with the bathwater After a decade of capitalist crisis and convulsions, interest in socialism in the USA has reached historic highs. Several members of Congress identify as socialists, and millions of Americans want to know what socialism is and what it isn’t. So what does it mean to be a “democratic socialist” or a “social democrat”? The form of government we live under today, bourgeois liberal democracy, is predicated on the legal equality of individuals vis à vis their rights to private property. While we are led to believe that “everyone has a voice,” in reality, this is democracy only for the rich, since equality of property rights in the abstract means nothing when property is so unequally distributed in practice. As Marx put it, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” By John Peterson
Only after the October Revolution did the Bolsheviks finally drop the words “social democratic” from the party name / Image: public domain
Environment:
From paradise to landfill: beloved California beach covered in trashBeachgoers hoping to stretch their legs on southern California’s famous Seal Beach were surprised to find a mountain of trash instead of sand and surf this week. After a trio of winter storms dropped inches of rain on the area, the beach looked more like a landfill than a pristine paradise. Shopping carts, traffic cones and Styrofoam were among the piles of debris that littered the stretch of beach. By Katharine Gammon
On the Front Lines of the Climate Change Movement: Mike Roselle Draws a Line The following is an excerpt from the new book The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink The beard is graying. The hair is clipped military-short. He is a large man, oddly shaped, like a cross between a grizzly and a javelina. It’s Roselle, of course, Mike Roselle—the outside agitator. He and a fellow activist have just spread an anti-coal banner in front of a growling bulldozer in West Virginia on a cold February morning in 2009. He’s in this icy and unforgiving land to oppose a brutal mining operation and will soon be arrested for trespassing. Massey Energy, the target of Roselle’s protest, is the fourth largest coal extractor in the United States, mining nearly 40 million tons of coal in Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee each year. By Jeffrey St. Clair – Joshua Frank
Greenwashing the Climate Catastrophe“With “capitalism in danger of falling apart” (a rare, cryptically honest quote from Al Gore), and years of stagnant global economic growth now in a free fall, the Greta campaign must be understood for what it is. An elaborate distraction that has nothing to do with protecting the natural world, and everything to do with the manufacturing of consent. The required consent of the citizenry that will unlock the treasuries and public monies under the guise of climate protection.” – Cory Morningstar and Forest Palmer, from The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – For Consent: The House is on Fire & the 90 Trillion Dollar Rescue, 2019. By Kenn Orphan
Big Energy:
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Resegregation:
Double segregation by race and economic status:
Both racial and poverty segregation create educational challenges for students and are related to unequal opportunity. Many schools are affected by both at the same time in a pattern our reports have called double segregation. When students are socialized in schools in which few students have benefited from the advantages and power that middle class families possess and exercise on behalf of their children, they are poorly prepared for a society where colleges/universities and good jobs are strongly white and middle class institutions. The informal contacts that develop in schools and neighborhoods and that often lead to better information, contacts, and opportunities also remain segregated. This is how segregation perpetuates racial isolation and inequality. The statistics we report in figure 3 show that all racial groups are experiencing a stunning increase in the average share of poor students attending their schools. —BrownAt 62: School Segregation By Race, Poverty And State(2016)
Since the Civil Rights Movement Leadership Got Co-Opted into the Demorcratic Party in the 70s, there has be a gradual process of resegregation. They Called it Urban Redevelopment, actually it was was Urban Black Removal. Later on, they used Disaster Capital to speed up the process. In todays’world, the United States has become segregated on the bases of income. Glen Ford made an excellent summary of this process right after the Katrina Disaster in New Orleans in his article: Will the ‘New’ New Orleans be Black? :
From the early days of the flood, it was clear that much of the city’s housing stock would be irredeemably damaged. The insurance industry may get a windfall of federal relief, but the minority of New Orleans home owners will get very little – even if they are insured. The renting majority may get nothing. If the catastrophe in New Orleans reaches the apocalyptic dimensions towards which it appears to be headed, there will be massive displacement of the Black and poor. Poor people cannot afford to hang around on the fringes of a city until the powers-that-be come up with a plan to accommodate them back to the jurisdiction. And we all know that the prevailing model for urban development is to get rid of poor people. The disaster provides an opportunity to deploy this model in New Orleans on a citywide scale, under the guise of rebuilding the city and its infrastructure. In place of the jobs that have been washed away, there could be alternative employment through a huge, federally funded rebuilding effort. But this is George Bush’s federal government. Does anyone believe that the Bush men would mandate that priority employment go to the pre-flood, mostly Black population of the city. And the Black mayor of New Orleans is a Democrat in name only, a rich businessman, no friend of the poor. What we may see in the coming months is a massive displacement of Black New Orleans, to the four corners of the nation. The question that we must pose, repeatedly and in the strongest terms, is: Through whose vision, and in whose interest, will New Orleans rise again. For Radio BC, I’m Glen Ford, From the early days of the flood, it was clear that much of the city’s housing stock would be irredeemably damaged. The insurance industry may get a windfall of federal relief, but the minority of New Orleans home owners will get very little – even if they are insured. The renting majority may get nothing. If the catastrophe in New Orleans reaches the apocalyptic dimensions towards which it appears to be headed, there will be massive displacement of the Black and poor. Poor people cannot afford to hang around on the fringes of a city until the powers-that-be come up with a plan to accommodate them back to the jurisdiction. And we all know that the prevailing model for urban development is to get rid of poor people. The disaster provides an opportunity to deploy this model in New Orleans on a citywide scale, under the guise of rebuilding the city and its infrastructure. In place of the jobs that have been washed away, there could be alternative employment through a huge, federally funded rebuilding effort. But this is George Bush’s federal government. Does anyone believe that the Bush men would mandate that priority employment go to the pre-flood, mostly Black population of the city. And the Black mayor of New Orleans is a Democrat in name only, a rich businessman, no friend of the poor. What we may see in the coming months is a massive displacement of Black New Orleans, to the four corners of the nation. The question that we must pose, repeatedly and in the strongest terms, is: Through whose vision, and in whose interest, will New Orleans rise again. For Radio BC, I’m Glen Ford.,
Bay Area housing prices push low-income minorities farther out, study findsThe rising cost of housing in the Bay Area has dramatically resegregated neighborhoods by race and pushed minority families to the outer edges of the region, a new paper shows. Researchers at UC Berkeley and the California Housing Partnership studied tract-level census data from 2000 to 2015 in each of the nine Bay Area counties. They found that a 30 percent increase in median rent corresponded with a 28 percent decrease in low-income minority households but no significant change in the number of white families. By Kimberly Veklerov
A woman walks past the Fillmore Blues Evolution mural in S.F.’s Western Addition, which like other historically black Bay Area neighborhoods, has lost scores of low-income black families. Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle
The Department of Justice Is Overseeing the Resegregation of American SchoolsA major investigation reveals that white parents are leading a secession movement with dire consequences for black children.On weekends, North Smithfield Manor smells like freshly cut grass, as men venture out under the Alabama sun to tend to their lawns. Kids race their bikes up and down the neighborhood’s hilly streets. Leslie Williams, a 34-year-old mother of three, lives in her childhood home in this secluded subdivision, perched atop a ridge five miles north of downtown Birmingham. The neighborhood hasn’t changed much since Williams was growing up. She remembers riding her bike over the same hills, admiring the men with their lawn mowers, and hanging out in the small park that serves as the community’s heart. By Emmanuel Felton. September6, 2017
Leslie Williams moved back to North Smithfield Manor to send her kids to the same schools she attended. White parents are intent on zoning them out of the district. (Tamika Moore)
Labor:
The Seattle General Strike: a 100-Year Legacy There will be many cheering and there will be some who fear. Both of these emotions are useful, but not too much of either. We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead – NO ONE KNOWS WHERE! We do not need hysteria. We need the iron march of labor. — Seattle Union Record, February 6, 1919 Thus, Anna Louise Strong, writing on behalf of the strikers, announced the 1919 Seattle General Strike. “Labor,” she wrote, “will feed the People… Labor will care for the babies and the sick… Labor will preserve order…” And indeed, that it did, for five February days. There had been nothing like it in the US before, nor since. By Cal Winslow
The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers. The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline The ShadowStats Alternate Unemployment Rate for January 2019 is 21.8%. The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers. The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.
Four centuries of white supremacy in Venezuela by those who identify their ancestors as European (White Spanish Conquistadors –R.S.) came to an end with the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, who won with the over-whelming support of the Mestizo majority. This turn away from white supremacy continues under Maduro, Chavez’s chosen successor.
In my interviews with Chavez for BBC beginning in 2002, he talked with humor about the fury of a white ruling class finding itself displaced by a man who embraced his own Indigenous and African heritage.
“Social investment in Venezuela during the Chavez administration reduced poverty from nearly 50% in 1999 to about 27% in 2011, increased school enrollment, substantially decreased infant and child mortality, and improved access to potable water and sanitation through social investment.”
But, just as Maduro took office, the price of oil began its collapse, and the vast social programs that oil had paid for were now supported by borrowing money and printing it, causing wild inflation. The economic slide is now made impossibly worse by what the UN rapporteur for Venezuela compared to “medieval sieges.” The Trump administration cut off Venezuela from the oil sale proceeds from its biggest customer, the US.
Everyone has been hurt economically, but the privileged class’s bank accounts have become nearly worthless. So, knowing that the Mestizo majority would not elect their Great White Hope Guaidó, they simply took to the streets — often armed. (And yes, both sides are armed.)
