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. Socialism Means True Democracy — The 99% Will Rule! — Not the Few!
One of Trump’s ‘Acting Heads’: The Poor Are No Longer Welcome In The United States!:
Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), has proposed a new interpretation of the famous welcome that appears on a placard at the Statue of Liberty. The famous lines, taken from The New Colossus by the 19th-century New York poet Emma Lazarus, read: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” In a radio interview on Tuesday, Cuccinelli offered a change: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.” On NPR’s Morning Edition, Cuccinelli defended the Trump administration decision to make it harder for migrants to be awarded permanent residence, or a “green card”, if they have ever accepted benefit programs such as food stamps, housing assistance or Medicaid. Starting in October, decisions on green card applicants will be based on a wealth test, meant to establish if they have the means to support themselves. Poor migrants will be denied if they are deemed likely to use government programs. — Trump official: Statue of Liberty poem should mean ‘poor who can stand on own two feet’
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!
‘Give Me Your Tired and Your Poor… Who Can Stand on Their Own Two Feet’: Top Trump Official Rewrites Statue of Liberty Greeting “Cuccinelli may as well have this engraved on a plaque, hang it around his neck, and wear it for the rest of his life,” said the director of the ACLU’s immigrant rights project. Acting Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli is under fresh fire on Tuesday after telling NPR in an interview that the famous words engraved on the U.S. Statue of Liberty—based on the poem by Emma Lazarus—should be re-cast with a qualifier when it comes to the kinds of people arriving at the nation’s shores seeking refuge or welcome. By Jon QueallyFarmers Hit Back as USDA Chief Sonny Perdue Mocks Those Harmed by Trump Trade War as ‘Whiners’ “He doesn’t understand what farmers are dealing with, and he’s the head of the Department of Agriculture. He’s supposed to be working for farmers.” Farmers facing record bankruptcies and collapsing incomes due to President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war with China were not amused by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue’s joke about their economic pain during an event in Minnesota last week. “I had a farmer tell me this in Pennsylvania,” Perdue told an audience of thousands of farmers gathered in a barn near Morgan, Minnesota. “What do you call two farmers in a basement? A whine cellar.” By Jake Johnson
Environment:
Prior to his appointment as U.S. Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, wasn’t even aware that the DOE was responsible for oversight of nuclear weapons and regulatory control of all nuclear materials within the United States. Therefore it is no surprise to most of us that Mr. Perry had no idea of the exorbitant costs associated with the clean-up and safe disposal of all atomic waste encompassing everything from atomic test labs and bomb making facilities to the final disposal of America’s worn-out power reactors and their highly radioactive parts and fuel. According to The Columbian, Perry was shocked…SHOCKED, I tell you…when he learned of the escalating cost of clean-up at the most contaminated spot in the country, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State. The Columbian continued: “At the end of January, a new life cycle cost and schedule report was released by the Department of Energy, putting the estimated remaining cost of Hanford clean up, plus several years of monitoring, at $323 billion to $677 billion.” Fairewinds readers are no doubt more familiar with the Hanford site than was the newly minted Secretary of Energy, and know that Hanford was the site where some of our nation’s earliest atomic bombs and reactors were developed and tested. Ever since the mid-twentieth century, Hanford has been central to our nation’s quandary over what to do with the unique problem of nuclear waste and which presents ever new and vexing toxicities as it takes thousands and thousands of years to fully decay away. Hanford has roughly 56-million-gallons of the deadly radioactive sludge on its site. It’s been 80-years since Hanford started producing plutonium for nuclear weapons and atomic bombs, and while the facility stopped production more than 30-years ago, no technology has appeared on the horizon capable of cleaning up or containing the waste. The Hanford Site workers are ill and have been contaminated by radioactive dust, and the site continues slowly leaking; its poisonous payload inching its way toward the great Columbia River! — To Become A Nuclear Waste Expert – Deputy Secretary Of Energy “Sleeps At A Holiday Inn Express”
‘Disgusting and Disturbing’: Trump Guts Endangered Species Act in Gift to Big Business “This administration seems set on damaging fragile ecosystems by prioritizing industry interests over science.” Environmentalists denounced the Trump administration for crashing a “bulldozer” through the Endangered Species Act on Monday after the Interior Department finalized a series of rollbacks to the 46-year-old law that will further imperil hundreds of vulnerable animal and plant species while paving the way for business development projects. By Jake Johnson
Book Review;The Fight Against Monsanto’s RoundupThe Politics of Pesticides Better Living Through Chemistry was an advertising slogan, I think for Dow Chemical, seen on black and white TV when I was a youth in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It all seemed so innocent back then. But it never was. The stuff chemical giants like Dow, Dupont, etc., were selling then—pesticides such as DDT and malathion for instance—were all part of an explosion of chemical products following World War II, most based on the development of chemical warfare during the war. Development for war continued, as with the notorious Agent Orange—the long-lasting and harmful effects of which were covered up by Dow and Monsanto—used in the devastating U.S. war on Vietnam. But proliferation of toxic chemicals doesn’t stop there. By Mitchel Cohen
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Black Agenda Radio for Week of August 12, 2019 Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.
Racist US Medical System Kills Black Mothers “Pervasive racism in the medical profession” is to blame for the fact that three times as many Black mothers die in child-birth as whites,” said Dana-Ain Davis, author of “Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy and Premature Birth.” Bad medical outcomes will continue for Blacks until the medical structure “is able to acknowledge that racism permeates the system,” said Davis, director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the City University of New York.
Sudan Transition May Work The agreement reached between civilians and the Sudanese military to share power in a three-year transitional government has a good chance to succeed if peace agreements can be finalized with armed groups in the next six months, said Ahmed Kadouda, a Sudanese national and researcher at George Washington University. Peace and structural reforms are necessary to give the population “a shared sense of what it is to be Sudanese,” said Kadouda.
US Black Peace Delegation Returns from Venezuela A delegation of the Black Alliance for Peace was honored by the Venezuelan government and citizens for taking part in protecting that nation’s embassy in Washington from takeover by coup plotters. “Everywhere we went,” said BAP delegate Netfa Freeman, “Black and brown working class people were all indignant at the violation” of Venezuela’s national sovereignty.
Fight Mass Incarceration Like Our Ancestors Fought Slavery “It’s remarkable how much the prison system looks like the institution of slavery,” said Kellie Jackson, author of “Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence.” Jackson, who teaches African American Studies at Wellesley College, said today’s activists are looking at “the tactics and strategies of the abolitionists and asking, How can we employ this in our own moment.”
Labor:
Today in Labor History August 11th Federal troop drove over 1,200 jobless workers from the nation’s capital. Led by unemployed activist Charles “Hobo” Kelley and Jacob Coxey, they camped in Washington D.C. starting in July. Kelley’s Hobo Army included a young journalist named Jack London and a young miner-cowboy named Big Bill Haywood. Frank Baun was an observer of the protest and some say it influenced his Wizard of Oz, with the Scarecrow representing the American farmer, the Tin Man representing industrial workers and the Cowardly Lion representing William Jenning Bryan, all marching on Washington (Oz) to demand redress from the president (the Wizard). 650 miners, led by a “General” Hogan, captured a Northern Pacific train at Butte, Montana, en route to the protest. The Feds caught up with them in Billings, forcing a surrender. A few eventually made it to Washington. – 1894
Police in the Bay confront members of Kelly’s Industrial Army as they were forming for the long trip to Washington. More than 1000 would head out on commandeered freight trains.
Economy:
Under conditions of a marked slowdown in the global economy—the signs of which are already apparent in Europe, China, Southeast Asia and in the US itself, where business investment and manufacturing are in decline — it will set off a dog-eat-dog struggle for markets, with no end in sight. On top of the labelling of China a “currency manipulator,” there are other clear indications of the shift to such a policy. Trump has railed against the US Federal Reserve for not lowering interest rates fast enough in order to counter the effects of a fall in the value of the euro and the renminbi, saying the Fed’s actions have placed him at a disadvantage in dealing with the European Union and China. The shift towards currency warfare is not confined to the administration. Last week, a piece of legislation was introduced in the US Senate, jointly sponsored by a Republican and a Democratic senator, aimed at lowering the value of the US dollar. According to its sponsors, the legislation was necessary because for “two decades” foreign countries, including China, had “manipulated their currencies to boost their exports while making American products more expensive abroad” and foreign purchases of US financial assets had “also led to an overvalued American dollar.” — Currency war: A new stage in capitalist breakdown
Shhh! Don’t Tell the Public There Was a Frightening “Glitch” in Stock Markets Yesterday Where did the U.S. stock market actually close yesterday? It’s pretty much an open question. To give you an idea of just how bad the so-called “glitch” was yesterday, Bill Griffeth, the co-anchor of the CNBC show, the Nightly Business Report, had to deliver this warning to his viewers before reporting the prices of the closing stock market indexes yesterday. “By the way, toward the close, there was a technical issue with trading computers. It’s not clear if all of the volume was reported or if some of the prices of the indexes were affected. You might see different numbers elsewhere but these were the numbers we had of the close today.” (See video below of the program.) By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Hong Kong’s Fight For Life Hong Kong has justified its existence as an interface between Western neoliberal globalism and China’s statist authoritarian capitalism. China no longer needs the city to play that role; Hong Kongers desperately need an alternative. On the sweltering first Monday of August, Hong Kong residents—from bankers to broadcasters to bus drivers—launched a general strike, leaving thousands of normally hectic businesses barren. The city’s meticulously on-time subway network was crippled as protesters jammed doors for hours; even the international airport was nearly empty as workers stayed home, grounding hundreds of flights, with ripple effects across the world. It was a desperate bid for a breakthrough after more than nine brutal weeks of massive anti-government demonstrations, originally sparked by an extradition bill that could expose Hong Kong citizens to the Chinese legal system. By mid-morning, Carrie Lam—the city’s obstinate, Beijing-backed leader—made clear she would do nothing to defuse the political emergency that has now seen more than 2 million on the streets, multiple suicides, and the arrests of nearly 600 people, including many students, who may each face up to a decade in prison on rioting charges. By Wilfred Chan
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!
Quotes of the Day:
Farmers Hit Back as USDA Chief Sonny Perdue Mocks Those Harmed by Trump Trade War as ‘Whiners’ “He doesn’t understand what farmers are dealing with, and he’s the head of the Department of Agriculture. He’s supposed to be working for farmers.” Farmers facing record bankruptcies and collapsing incomes due to President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war with China were not amused by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue’s joke about their economic pain during an event in Minnesota last week. “I had a farmer tell me this in Pennsylvania,” Perdue told an audience of thousands of farmers gathered in a barn near Morgan, Minnesota. “What do you call two farmers in a basement? A whine cellar.” By Jake Johnson
