During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three Point Political Program: Austerity, Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and 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.
Oshawa GM Plant Workers “Collateral Damage”The GM plant in Oshawa has shrunk from 23,000 jobs in early 1980’s to 300 today. Taxpayers bailed out GM to save jobs and productive capacity. A democratic just transition that saves the community and the jobs are possible, says former Assistant to the President of the Canadian Autoworkers Union, Sam Gindin
U.S.:
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!
Hacking Dirty Government Secrets Is Not a Crime British goon cops acting at the request of the United States government entered Ecuador’s embassy in London, dragged out WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and prepared to ship him across the pond. After this event last month most of the mainstream media reacted with spiteful glee about Assange’s predicament and relief that the Department of Justice had exercised self-restraint in its choice of charges.“Because traditional journalistic activity does not extend to helping a source break a code to gain illicit access to a classified network, the charge appeared to be an attempt by prosecutors to sidestep the potential First Amendment minefield of treating the act of publishing information as a crime,” reported a pleased The New York Times. By Ted Rall
Cover Ups and Truth Tellers In a 22 May 2019 appearance in the White House Rose Garden, President Donald Trump declared that “I don’t do cover-ups.” Various news outlets immediately started to enumerate a long list of bona fide cover-ups associated with the president. What can one say about this bit of Trumpian nonsense? Can you accuse a person of lying who actually seems not to know the difference between truth and untruth? Trump’s inability in this regard is demonstrated daily, and the Washington Post fact checker puts the running count of presidential lies at 10,111, with no end in sight. When it comes to reality, the president appears to be a malignant version of Walter Mitty. By Lawrence Dividson
Mission Creep: How the NSA’s Game-Changing Targeting System Built for Iraq and Afghanistan Ended Up on the Mexico BorderIn November2005, two terminals for a new secure communications platform arrived at the U.S. military base at Bagram Airfield, outside Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. The first of its kind, the system would enable the U.S.’s electronic eavesdropping organization, the National Security Agency, to instantaneously share select classified information with America’s closest allies in the fight against the Taliban, speeding the delivery of critical information to soldiers. Previously, the only way to pass intelligence at Bagram between the U.S. and partner nations was to hand it over as hard copy. These two first nodes in what would eventually become a larger network, known as CENTER ICE, would end the paper shuffling, ultimately saving the lives of troops in combat. By Henrik Moltke
The Real Russian Menace Is Just Hypercapitalism In the years leading up to the 2014 Winter Olympics, Russia spent something on the order of $50 billion to turn the sleepy Black Sea vacation town of Sochi into a glittering destination resort full of high-end amenities, luxury housing, international cuisine, palm trees and promenades. A giant ski resort bloomed across the slopes of the nearby western Caucasus mountains. Western journalists who arrived weeks before the games delighted in posting examples of incompetent (and, by implication, corrupt) building and construction, although many of these—such as a notorious photo of a bathroom stall with two toilets and a single toilet-paper dispenser—were later debunked. By Jacob Bacharach
Environment:
Will Ohio River Get Optional Pollution Limits as New Fracking-Reliant Plastics Industry Moves in? Tomorrow, June 6, in Covington, Kentucky, a routine quarterly meeting of the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission (ORSANCO), an eight-state compact responsible for setting water pollution control standards for the 981-mile Ohio River, is expected to fall under unusual scrutiny from both industry and environmentalists. ORSANCO is considering a proposal to make its water pollution standards — designed to coordinate pollution rules the length of the river — voluntary amid a brewing battle over the fate of a river that’s both the source of drinking water for 5 million people and central to the petrochemical industry’s plans for a new fossil-fueled plastics manufacturing network. By Sharon Kelly
The plastics industry, enabled by a glut of inexpensive fracked gas, is projected to add 28 million tons of plastic production this decade,with more than $202 billion slated for investment in 333 new or expanded facilities. This investment is expected to drive a 40 percent increase in global plastic production over the next decade.
The electric power industry plans to develop 364 new fracked gas-fired plants by 2022. Already, gas deliveries to power plants increased 57 percent between 2006 and 2017.
Fracking companies are pushing LNG exports in order to reduce local gas supply, thereby increasing domestic prices and profits. In 2018, there were only three active LNG export facilities in the U.S., but 22 more were either being built or approved for construction, and an additional 22 were pending federal reviewby the end of the year.
Not ‘Freedom Gas’ But ‘Failure Gas’: First-of-Its-Kind Report Details Planetary Perils of US Fracking Infrastructure Boom“These projects aren’t just associated with health and safety risks: if even a fraction of them come to fruition, they will condemn the planet to a future of climate chaos.” A first-of-its-kind report released Wednesday by Food & Water Watch details the more than 700 new U.S. facilities that have been recently built or proposed for development “to capitalize off of a glut of cheap fracked gas,” and the consequences for the planet and its inhabitants if these projects are allowed to continue. By Jessica Corbett
Trump Wants to Make Alaska’s Protected Wilderness a Hunting Ground A video featuring a father and son slaughtering a mother black bear and then her two screaming newborn cubs in their den has ricocheted around the world, drawing obvious comparisons to the killing of Cecil, the African lion, by a Minnesota dentist several years ago. Sadly, the shocking brutality the two men displayed for the world to see could soon be sanctioned by this administration. By Kitty Block
‘We Are Literally Sawing Off the Branch We All Live On’: Amazon Deforestation Increasing Under Bolsonaro“People who destroy forests feel safe and those who protect forests feel threatened.” Satellite images reviewed by the Brazilian government show massive deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, a grim reminder of the devastation wrought by the country’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro. According toReuters, 285 square miles of forest was cleared in May, the highest one month total in a decade. The information comes from Brazilian space research institute INPE’s DETER alert system. By Eoin Higgins
Forest and topsoil must first be removed before ore can be accessed at Brazil’s Norsk Hydro ASA Paragominas open pit mine. Such industrial processes would be highly destructive of Brazil’s forests, indigenous reserves and cultures. (Photo: Norsk Hydro ASA via VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-SA.)
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
The GOP’s White Supremacy Now Has a Smoking GunThe United States Supreme Court is expected to rule shortly in the case of Department of Commerce v. New York — a critical legal battle over the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S. census. The Trump administration and Republican Party have pushed hard on the idea of collecting citizenship information from U.S. residents, claiming the move is not intended to be harmful and that it simply represents a bid to return the census to an earlier status quo. In fact, proponents have gone as far as to claim that such information would help enforce protections for minority voters under the Voting Rights Act. By Sonali KolhatkarBlack Lives Matter Founder Launches Huge Project to Shrink Black Lives Alicia Garza and her crew conducted what they claim is the biggest survey of Black political opinion ever — but failed to ask a single question about foreign policy. “The surveyors were not interested in Black people’s views on U.S. military violence abroad, or the impact of U.S. policies on poverty in the world, or anything at all about Africa.” Alicia Garza, of Black Lives Matter fame, last week introduced her latest project in the pages of the New York Times: a survey of “more than 31,000 black people from all 50 states” to determine, as the headline announced, “What Black People Want .” The Black Census Project “is the largest independent survey of black people ever conducted in the United States,” wrote Garza. A collaboration of Garza’s Black Futures Lab , Color of Change , Dēmos , and Socioanalítica Research , the project “trained more than 100 black organizers and worked with some 30 grass-roots organizations” to elicit Black people’s views on a range of domestic subjects – but asked not a single question related to war and peace. By Glen Ford, Bar executive editorLabor:
Economy:
Laissez Faire Capitalism Is Here With a Vengeance!
Instead of strengthening the protections investors receive when they rely on brokers for investment recommendations, they will weaken the protections that apply when investors turn to investment advisers for advice. Congress gave the SEC all the authority it needs to adopt a strong, pro-investor standard for brokers and advisers, and the Chairman made a deliberate choice not to use that authority. Barbara Roper, the Director of Investor Protection at the Consumer Federation of America
Crony Capitalism: Trump’s Tariff War Is Bad for Everyone But His Friends Since time out of mind, presidents have deployed the “Hey, look over here!” tactic to distract the public from politically damaging stories. In less than three years, Donald Trump has raised the practice nearly to the level of performance art. His latest wingding over tariffs against Mexico, however, could have lasting repercussions both for his political standing and the national economy at large. By William Rivers Pitt
The Trump Administration Is Proving a Gift to Predatory Lenders In mid-March, the payday lending industry held its annual convention at the Trump National Doral hotel outside Miami. Payday lenders offer loans on the order of a few hundred dollars, typically to low-income borrowers, who have to pay them back in a matter of weeks. The industry has long been reviled by critics for charging stratospheric interest rates — typically 400% on an annual basis — that leave customers trapped in cycles of debt.By Anjali Tsui and Alice WilderThe Wall Street Robber Barons are Free to 50 Plunder: Public Interest Groups Blast SEC for Shilling for Wall Street’s “Best Interest”The long-awaited final rule from the Securities and Exchange Commission called Regulation Best Interest, which grew out of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation and was intended to require that the nation’s stockbrokers put their clients’ interests ahead of their own, was voted on by the SEC yesterday. Three Republican Commissioners voted for it while the sole Democrat, Robert Jackson, voted against it and issued a detailed statement on why it sells out Main Street. By Pam and Russ Martens
World:
China, Russia Will Support Stabilization in Venezuela: Putin China was also willing to “help Venezuela return to a normal development path as soon as possible”, Xi Jinping said. President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping met Wednesday in Moscow in order to discuss bilateral agreements and strategic interests, while also discussing the situation in Venezuela, vowing that their governments would work hard to “stabilize.” Chinese President Xi Jinping told Russian media that China would work with the international community to play a constructive role with Venezuela and help the country get back on a normal development path as soon as possible.Health, 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 ‘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!
UCSF loses contract as Trump administration restricts fetal tissue research The Trump administration on Wednesday announced major new restrictions in funding of research involving human fetal tissue — a product that many scientists say is irreplaceable in studying certain diseases — in a move that immediately ended a decades-long partnership with UCSF involving HIV research. The National Institutes of Health, the country’s largest single provider of medical research funding, will no longer support new research by its in-house scientists that uses human fetal tissue obtained from abortions. Scientists with NIH grants who do not work for the agency will be allowed to continue applying for funding, but their applications will be subject to approval from a newly created review board. By Erin Allday
Quote of the Day:
Labor:
The Wall Street Robber Barons are Free to 50 Plunder: 
Health, Education, and Welfare: