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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!
Images of the Day:
GM Auto Workers Strike for Power and to Protect Workers Retired UAW Leader Frank Hammer talks about why the workers struck, what it means for the union movement, and what this battle means
Economic Update: Capitalism in DenialThe first half of this week’s episode of Economic Update features a discussion by Professor Wolff on the parallels of declining capitalism in the UK and the U.S. and how the denials of the systemic problems inherent with capitalism are making the economic situations in both countries profoundly worse. In the second half of this week’s show, Professor Wolff presents two longer segments on (1) the political economy of immigration, and (2) why the basic problem of Central and South America is 2-3 centuries of capitalism producing and reproducing extreme inequality, staggering poverty, and corrupt government elites. That is the crucial context for the Cuban and Venezuelan efforts, however imperfect and against U.S. opposition, to break out of capitalism.
US Blames Iran for Attacks on Saudi Arabia Oil Facilities
Quotes of the Day:
Due to the UAW corruption exposure, UAW President Is Unnamed Co-Conspirator In Corruption Probe: Report, the Rank and File UAW autoworkers have been free from the Corrupt/Union/Management /Government austerity drive the workers have expressed their pent-up resentment in the cuts to their standard of living, pensions, healthcare, and wage cuts through to tiered wage system! — Roland Sheppard
UAW Workers Strike for Wages and Healthcare Oppose Austerity!:
Workers want a bigger slice of the profits that swelled to $8 billion for General Motors last year. The union wants pay raises annually to protect against the possibilities of a recession, but the company wants to pay lump sums tied to earnings in order to protect themselves in an economic downturn. The union also demands the automaker keep four factories they are trying to close open and functioning, two are in the Detroit area, one in Lordstown, Ohio, near Cleveland, and another outside Baltimore. GM currently says it has too much U.S. factory capacity. Health benefits are often a major point of contention between the groups and weigh heavily on the profit margins of automakers when vehicle sales cycle downward. An uncertain trade market and a push for tighter emission standards led by California could have played a role in complicating the talks. “While we are fighting for better wages, affordable quality health care, and job security, GM refuses to put hard working Americans ahead of their record profits,” said in a statement Saturday night. The strike begins as the powerful union is under intense scrutiny from a federal investigation inching closer to top leadership. The Detroit News reported Friday that UAW President Gary Jones and former president Dennis Williams are named in a criminal complaint alleging a vast embezzlement scheme where union funds were used for personal gain. — Union Auto Workers Set to Strike at GM Plants
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! The United States takes from the poor and gives to the Rich.
Recalling the Hundreds of Thousands of Civilian Victims of America’s Endless ‘War on Terror’According to very conservative estimates, as reported by the “Costs of War” project of Brown University’s Watson Institute on International and Public Affairs, nearly 250,000 civilians have been killed during the 8 years since September 2001 in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in wars or attacks that were instigated by the United States. Those are very conservative figures carefully compiled by organizations like Iraq Body Count, the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies. These numbers are people known to have died in the violence of war, mostly as so-called “collateral damage,” but often deliberately, as when the US bombs a hospital, a wedding or a private housing compound in order to kill some targeted individual considered an “enemy combatant,” unconcerned about the others in the area, often women and children, who are almost certain to die or suffer serious injury as the result of a strike. By Dave Lindorff
Our Invisible Government There are two forms of government in the United States. There is the visible government—the White House, Congress, the courts, state legislatures and governorships—and the invisible government, or deep state, where anonymous technocrats, intelligence operatives, generals, bankers, corporations and lobbyists manage foreign and domestic policy regardless of which political party holds a majority. The most powerful and important organs in the invisible government are the nation’s bloated and unaccountable intelligence agencies. They are the vanguard of the invisible government. They oversee a vast “black world,” tasked with maintaining the invisible government’s lock on power. They spy on and smear domestic and foreign critics, fix elections, bribe, extort, torture, assassinate and flood the airwaves with “black propaganda.” They are impervious to the chaos and human destruction they leave in their wake. Disasters, social upheavals, economic collapses, massive suffering, death and rabid anti-American blowback have grown out of the invisible government’s overthrow of democratically elected governments in Iran, Guatemala and Chile and the wars it fostered in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. The United States and the rest of the globe would be far safer if our self-styled shadow warriors—who failed to foresee the Iranian revolution, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 9/11 attacks or the absence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and whose widespread use of torture makes them the most potent recruiters for radical jihadism—were made accountable to the public and the rule of law. By Chris Hedges
ICE Plans to Start Destroying Records of Immigrant Abuse, Including Sexual Assault and Deaths in CustodyImmigration and Customs Enforcement recently asked the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which instructs federal agencies on how to maintain records, to approve its timetable for retaining or destroying records related to its detention operations. This may seem like a run-of-the-mill government request for record-keeping efficiency. It isn’t. An entire paper trail for a system rife with human rights and constitutional abuses is at stake. ICE has asked for permission to begin routinely destroying 11 kinds of records, including those related to sexual assaults, solitary confinement and even deaths of people in its custody. Other records subject to destruction include alternatives to detention programs, regular detention monitoring reports, logs about the people detained in ICE facilities, and communications from the public reporting detention abuses. ICE proposed various timelines for the destruction of these records ranging from 20 years for sexual assault and death records to three years for reports about solitary confinement. By Victoria López
Environment:
Let’s Make Friday the Biggest Day of Climate Action in Global History What do Ben and Jerry’s, an 800,000-member South African trade union, countless college professors, a big chunk of Amazon’s Seattle workforce, and more high school students than you can imagine have in common? They’re all joining in a massive climate strike this coming Friday, September 20 — a strike that will likely register as the biggest day of climate action in the planet’s history. By Bill McKibben
Capitalism Kills:
EPA is Now Allowing Asbestos Back Into ManufacturingFast Company recently reported on the potential comeback of one of the most infamous building materials of recent memory. Asbestos is now legally allowed back into U.S. manufacturing under a serious of loopholes by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). As Fast Company reported, on June 1, the EPA authorized a “SNUR” (Significant New Use Rule) that allowed the distribution of products containing asbestos on a case-by-case basis. According to Fast Company, the EPA’s recently released report detailing its new framework for evaluating the risk of its top prioritized substances states that the agency will “no longer consider the effect or presence of substances in the air, ground, or water in its risk assessments.” By Sydney Franklin
Japan Will Have to Dump Radioactive Water Into Pacific as Fukushima Runs Out ff Storage Tanks, Minister SaysThe operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant will have no choice but to release more than 1 million tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean, Japan’s environment minister said on Tuesday
Scientists’ Advice to People Living in Coastal Areas? Move. A recent mountaineering trip found me and two climbing partners camping alongside a beautiful glacial lake in North Cascades National Park. Purple flowers swayed in the cool breeze coming down from the glacier above us. No less than five wispy waterfalls flowed down a rock wall behind our camp — the melting runoff from a smaller glacier up above. The scene was idyllic, but it also betrayed a sinister reality. The place where we were camping used to be all glacier. The lake beside us used to be solid ice. Now, like most glaciers globally, the glacier is in rapid retreat. By Dahr Jamail
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Black Agenda Radio for Week of September 16, 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.
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Warmongering Democratic Candidates for President Not one Democrat on the stage in Houston objected to Washington’s economic warfare and constant subversion and military threats against Venezuela.
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US Schools are a “Carceral” and “Punitive Landscape” and advocate for women and girls, who wrote an influential article titled, “Racialized and Gendered Violence Permeates School Discipline.” “We now have to think about the architecture of the school as a punitive landscape where students are subjected to surveillance cameras” and more police on campus,” said Wun.
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Blacks Pay High Price for Bad Healthcare Dr Leslie Hinkson, author of “Subprime Health: Debt and Race in US Medicine,” said Black people “get bad care, and that not only leads to further undermining of their health, but they also ultimately wind up having to pay more for it.”
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Police Killings of Blacks Explode in Bolsonaro’s Brazil In just three months, police in Rio de Janeiro killed 434 people, most of them young Black men. Joao Costa Vargas, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Riverside and author of “The Denial of Anti-Blackness,” blames President Jair Bolsonaro, who claimed that the former Workers Party government was “too weak on crime,” and promised that he would make Brazil “white again.” Bolsonaro is often called “Brazil’s Trump.”
Labor:
General Motors Strike Not Likely to be Resolved Anytime Soon
Experts UAW leaders want to show the rank and file they’re “tough guys,” while management wants to avoid being “locked in.” On this General Motors and the United Auto Workers agree — the strike that sent 50,000 workers out on the picket lines Monday is not likely to be over anytime soon. Both sides are talking, but both sides are bracing for a long and costly fight as workers dig in on their fight for better wages, health care benefits and job security, union representatives and auto industry experts said. “It will go on as long as it’s going to take to achieve our bargaining goals,” Chuck Browning, the UAW’s Region 1A Director, told MSNBC. “The bottom line is this company has been extremely profitable for a long period of time. Those profits have been made off the sweat and the hard work of our members, and our members want a fair agreement.” By Corky Siemaszko
“All the union officials should be put back on the line and work ten years as TPTs”: GM workers determined to fight as Ford and Chrysler workers press to join strike On their first day on the picket lines, General Motors workers are expressing their determination to fight the auto giant. Workers are winning broad popular support for their stand in defense of health care and an end to the abuse of younger second-tier and temporary part-time (TPT) workers. US autoworkers shut down General Motors By Jerry White
Will Jamie Dimon Finally Lose His Job Over Racketeering Charges?Yesterday, three traders at JPMorgan Chase, the bank headed by Jamie Dimon, got smacked with the same kind of criminal felony charge that was used to indict members of the Gambino crime family in 2017. The charge is racketeering and falls under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO. According to the Justice Department, the traders engaged in a pattern of rigging the gold, silver and other precious metals markets from approximately May 2008 to August 2016. One of the traders, Michael Nowak, was actually a Managing Director at the bank and the head of its Global Precious Metals Desk. The other two traders are Gregg Smith and Christopher Jordan. BY Pam Martens and Russ Martens
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President Trump attacked GM on Twitter, claiming it is now one of the smallest car manufacturers in Detroit.
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GM says it employs nearly 49,000 union employees in the U.S., more than rival Fiat Chrysler.
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GM has been investing heavily in China, where it is now one of that nation’s largest car manufacturers.
President Donald Trump on Friday disdainfully labeled General Motors as “one of the smallest car manufacturers” in Detroit, reprising his call that the automaker move jobs back to the U.S. Something else he might not be happy with: GM is also one of the largest car makers in China. In fact, GM now employs more workers in China than it does members of the United Auto Workers in the U.S. According to its website, the company now has about 58,000 workers in China By Stephen Gandel
World:
Boris Johnson ‘Chickens’ Out Of Own Press Conference Amid Noisy Protests, Leaving Empty Podium Next to Luxembourg’s PMSource says Downing Street thought PM would not be able to be heard properly above protests Boris Johnsonfailed to turn up to his own press conference as noisy anti-Brexit protesters vented their anger, in extraordinary scenes in Luxembourg on Monday. Xavier Bettel, the country’s leader, went ahead to speak to the press without the British prime minister – standing next to an empty podium as he fiercely criticised him. Attacking the UK’s failure to present fresh proposals to break the Brexit impasse, Mr Bettel said – to applause from onlookers – that the “clock is ticking” and told Mr Johnson: “Stop speaking and act.” Mr Johnson had been in Luxembourg to meet the country’s leader and Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, for the first time face-to-face. But after enduring loud boos and taunts on the way in from assembled protesters, Mr Johnson walked away without doing his promised appearance in front of the media. A UK government source said he would instead do a clip in private with broadcasters away from the assembled public and press. By Jon Stone and Lizzy Buchan
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!
Nursing Homes Are a Breeding Ground for a Fatal FungusDrug-resistant germs, including Candida auris, prey on severely ill patients in skilled nursing facilities, a problem sometimes amplified by poor care and low staffing. Maria Davila lay mute in a nursing home bed, an anguished expression fixed to her face, as her husband stroked her withered hand. Ms. Davila, 65, suffers from a long list of ailments — respiratory failure, kidney disease, high blood pressure, an irregular heartbeat — and is kept alive by a gently beeping ventilator and a feeding tube. Doctors recently added another diagnosis to her medical chart: Candida auris, a highly contagious, drug-resistant fungus that has infected nearly 800 people since it arrived in the United States four years ago, with half of patients dying within 90 days.At least 38 other patients at Ms. Davila’s nursing home, Palm Gardens Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in Brooklyn, have been infected with or carry C. auris, a germ so virulent and hard to eradicate that some facilities will not accept patients with it. Now, as they struggle to contain the pathogen, public health officials from cities, states and the federal government say that skilled nursing facilities like Palm Gardens are fueling its spread. “They are the dark underbelly of drug-resistant infection,” said Dr. Tom Chiller, who heads the fungal division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaking about skilled nursing facilities, particularly those with ventilated patients, but not Palm Gardens specifically. By Matt Richtel and Andrew Jacobs
Cutting Health Benefits of 1,900 Whole Food Workers Saved World’s Richest Man Jeff Bezos What He Makes in Less Than Six Hours A new analysis finds that the billionaire could provide annual coverage slashed last week with just a fraction of what he makes personally each day. That’s according to an analysis from Decision Data’s “Data in the News” series, which found that Bezos could cover the entirety of annual benefits for part-time employees who work less than 30 hours a week with what he makes from stocks and investments in just a fraction of a day. By Eoin Higgins
Videos of the Day:
Economy: