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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!
Austerity’s Race to the Bottom!: Glen Ford been one of the few to nail austerity and oppose it. Very few socialist understand or appreciate how austerity effects all working people and the depth of the ‘race to the bottom’!:
Drop the Term “Austerity” – It’s the Race to the Bottom In the corporate-organized Race to the Bottom, withdrawal of health care is a weapon to discipline workers and their families, as is the whole “austerity” regime.“Capital found a solution to falling profits with the promise of super-exploitation of labor in what used to be called the Third World.” Let’s get straight to the point. The striking General Motors workers are locked in an epochal struggle against the global corporate drive to reduce the entirety of the world’s working class to a state of abject desperation, leaving the great mass of people — from Detroit to Bangladesh — with no options but to accept whatever wages and conditions of labor the bosses offer. This is the essential, global imperative of today’s late stage capitalism, and the tie that binds the money-men that control both U.S. governing parties, their counterparts in Europe, and billionaires the world over. Most commonly dubbed “austerity,” it is a calculated and multifaceted strategy to save late stage capitalism through a relentless “Race to the Bottom,” globally buttressed by U.S. imperial power, from which no one is to be spared except the relatively small slice of population that most directly serves the scientific, technical and security interests of the Lords of Capital — a political alliance of the .1 percent and the upper 10 percent. The 50,000 GM workers demand “No More Tiers !” – an end to the two-tier system of wages that separates older and newer hires — and permanent status for the “perma-temps,” supposedly temporary workers who in fact labor for years doing the same work as regular employees but with less pay, few benefits and no rights. All reports from the picket lines show the strikers are adamant for solidarity and equality among all the tiers, although United Auto Workers leadership is shaky, as usual, having swallowed those poison pills of labor division in previous negotiations with the bosses. “All Reports From The Picket Lines Show The Strikers Are Adamant For Solidarity And Equality Among All The Tiers.” Labor solidarity is the overarching, determining factor, the only power that working people posses. Therefore, for the past half-century or so, the political task of corporate operatives in boardrooms, government and media has been to methodically dismantle the safety net of social supports – public health and occupational safety, adequate income, free and effective education, affordable housing, collective bargaining rights and fundamental civil liberties — erected during the New Deal and Great Society eras. Collectively, these “social democratic” reforms raised the standards of living of workers in the rich nations and gave them the practical life options to bargain with employers, as individuals and as a class. Through this arrangement, the Lords of Capital reluctantly shared some portion of the fruits of imperial plunder with at least some (whiter) sections of the domestic working classes in the home countries. By Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report Executive Editor
Images of the Day:
Obamas’ and the 1%’s Political Program, After the 2008 Crash has Been to Bailout and Protect Capitalism, the 1%, and to Attack the Standard of Living of the 99%. We Must Oppose Austerity In the United States and World-Wide! — To Begin, We Should Form a National Coalitions of Workers, Blacks, and Oppressed Minority Coalition to Call For a National March Against War, Poverty, and Austerity In Washington DC! — Stop the Race to the Bottom! — Roland Sheppard
Videos Of the Day:
Warming Oceans Are Rising at Alarming Rate, Says New UN Report The IPCC report concludes that unfettered climate change will cause glaciers to melt, destroy oceanic ecosystems, accelerate sea level rise, and wreak havoc on the earth. Despite all this, our guests say there still is hope. 
Economic Update: US Economy and the Market This week on Economic Update, Professor Wolff delivers an analysis of the state of the U.S. economy at summer’s end, 2019, and it’s a decidedly mixed picture. In the second half of this week’s show, Professor Wolff presents a counter to the imaginary ‘free market,’ focusing on its structure, social effects, and particular beneficiaries. 
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.
American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the PlantationSlavery helped turn America into a financial colossus. And our economy is still shaped by management practices invented by enslavers and overseers.A couple of years before he was convicted of securities fraud, Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug. Previously the drug cost $13.50 a pill, but in Shkreli’s hands, the price quickly increased by a factor of 56, to $750 a pill. At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,” he explained. “But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.” This is a capitalist society. It’s a fatalistic mantra that seems to get repeated to anyone who questions why America can’t be more fair or equal. By Matthew Desmond
The Polluters Own the Senate: Facing Climate Crisis, Senators Have Millions Invested in Fossil Fuel Companies As the United States Senate fails to act on catastrophic climate change, dozens of its members are profiting from investments in oil, gas, and coal companies that are fueling the crisis. Twenty-nine U.S. senators and their spouses own between $3.5 million and $13.9 million worth of stock in companies that extract, transport, or burn fossil fuels, or provide services to fossil fuel companies, according to a Sludge analysis of personal financial filings as of Aug. 16. The senators are invested in 86 fossil fuel companies, including well-known giants like ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, but also a range of lesser known companies that specialize in pipeline operations, natural gas exports, and oilfield services. By Donald Shaw 
Environment:
Dimitri Lascaris: Talk to us about how militarism is exacerbating the climate crisis. Roger Waters: Well, one thing that the military does really, really efficiently is pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I believe the U.S. military is responsible for some enormous percentage of the emissions all over the world. So that’s one thing where the two things are connected. What’s cool about today, I think, is that there are people who are specifically devoted to the idea of convincing their fellow citizens that climate change is real and that it is going to destroy the planet if we all don’t act collectively to do something about it. Ignoring climate change and encouraging militarism are disastrous, except for the people who are making money logging in the Amazon or the people who make money at Raytheon and the other armaments industries, which are legend and legion. And huge amounts of money are made. Good thing about weapons is they go bang and then you have to replace them with another one. A few people get killed; so what? So long as you make a profit out of it, they don’t care. But I care, and you care, and all the people here care. That lady shouting cares, which is good. —Roger Waters: We’re Ignoring One of Humanity’s Biggest Threats
With the stakes of global heating intolerable, and the fanglessness of international climate agreements undeniable, it is little wonder that activists are calling for the major perpetrators of environmental decimation to be seen as guilty parties in mass atrocity, on a par with war crimes and genocide. The demand that ecocide — the decimation of ecosystems, humanity and non-human life — be prosecutable by The International Criminal Court has found renewed force in a climate movement increasingly unafraid to name its enemies. — Ecocide Should Be Recognized As a Crime Against Humanity, But We Can’t Wait for The Hague to Judge
Pesticides in the Dock: Ecological Apocalypse But Business as Usual In a new paper published in King’s Law Journal — The Chemical Anthropocene: Glyphosate as a Case Study of Pesticide Exposure —the authors Alessandra Arcuri and Yogi Hale Hendlin state:“As the science against glyphosate safety mounts and lawsuits threaten its chemical manufacture’s profits, the next generation of GMO crops are being keyed to the pesticide dicamba, sold commercially as XtendiMax® – and poised to be the next glyphosate. Regulatory agencies have historically been quick to approve products but slow to reconsider regulations after the decades of accumulated harms become apparent.” They add that the entrenched asymmetries between public and ecological health and fast-to-market new chemicals is exacerbated by the seeming lack of institutionalized precautionary policies.
Climate Change and Consciousness Shift Perhaps it takes a climate crisis to get us to understand that our home is the whole planet and we’re all in this as one. Climate change: It feels like the approaching End Times. But it’s the secular version thereof, which means that humanity is responsible for both its cause and—if possible—its transcendence. All we need to do is change everything about the way the high-tech, global society functions in the next dozen years, in the process countermanding a political structure completely committed to (and profiting from) the status quo that’s creating the problem in the first place. By Robert C. Koehler
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Roman Empire 2018 —The New Jim Crow Prison Industrial Complex Gladiator Fights: “Gladiator Fights” Expose Prisons to Be Genocidal Machines“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead Shadowproof recently revealed that California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) prison officials are once again orchestrating “gladiator fights” at multiple state prisons. “Gladiator fights” are the institutional practice of pitting known rivals on the prison yard with foreknowledge that they are mandated to fight through their respective gang affiliation. Prison administrators know that certain groups are in conflict and will not associate with one another. However, sometimes this manufactured animosity does not work. For instance, in August 2012, the leaders of Black, white and Latinx groups from the Pelican Bay Segregated Housing Unit drafted the Agreement to End Hostilities for California’s prisons. The Agreement condemned CDCR’s divide-and-conquer method, successfully cutting in half the amount of violence occurring on prison yards throughout the state. By Timothy Malone
Labor:
Overnight, things rapidly happen. This response tby UAW workers in Canada and the United States, hopefully could be a sign of a beginning of a fight against the austerity policies of the last four decades. These strikes deserve our full support! A working-class victory could be a beginning of the rise of the calss struggle. We must oppose an expose any government and labor bureaucracy intervention to organize a defeat! — The Condition of the United States Working Class — Where Do We Go From Here?
Workers are Asking, Whose Side Are You On? ore than 2,200 nurses at the University of Chicago Medical Center went out on strike last week, but they are not alone. American workers are waking up and walking out. On Sept. 15, 46,000 hourly General Motors’ United Auto Workers employees went on strike, the first time in 12 years. Striking British Airway pilots grounded 1,700 planes. In Republican states like Oklahoma and West Virginia, teachers shut down schools to demand that state legislatures reverse the deep cuts exacted from public education. Marriott hotels were hit with the largest hotel strike in U.S. history, a walkout of 6,000 hotel workers in four states. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that a soaring number of workers went on strike or stopped work in 2018 — 485,000 — the most since 1986. By Jesse Jackson
Climate Strike/Auto Strike: Same Struggle, Same Fight We want a future, a future we can live in, in a society that values people and planet, now and coming up. Last Friday, as four million young people marched in the world’s capitals for action on climate, countless more were on the picket line supporting autoworkers who are out on strike. Both sets of strikers have guts and smarts and a righteous sense of urgency, but the latter had a fraction of the coverage, so let’s be clear: they’re all on the same side – the side of a future that we can actually inhabit. By Laura Flanders
Economy:
High Drama in SEC House Hearing Ignored by Mainstream Media Editors Note: We have a news flash for our reporting colleagues at mainstream media – you are missing high drama and great quotes by failing to cover the Wall Street-related hearings being held regularly by the House Financial Services Committee. This Committee is dead serious about holding Federal regulators and Wall Street banks’ collective feet to the fire. After more than 30 years of watching congressional hearings covering Wall Street, we have to commend the Chair of this Committee, Maxine Waters, and the individual Congressmen and Congresswomen who serve on this Committee for their outstanding knowledge of how Wall Street has erected an elaborate and highly efficient wealth transfer system from the poor and middle class of America to the pockets of the one percent. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Britain: Labour conference 2019 – members rally behind Corbyn, ready for an election!What a week! The last five days of this year’s Labour conference have certainly been a roller-coaster ride. But despite the best attempts of the Tory press to sour the mood, the feeling amongst those leaving Brighton today will no doubt be one of optimism and confidence in our movement. With the government in crisis, the Blairites in retreat, and a bolstered arsenal of radical policies at our disposal, grassroots members are primed to take the fight to Boris and the Tories. The message coming out of conference was clear: bring it on! We’re ready for an election! By Adam Booth
Britain: Labour4Clause4 makes waves at Labour conference 2019 The British Labour Party has been holding its national conference over the past several days. At a Labour4Clause4 fringe meeting on Monday evening, a packed room of grassroots Labour activists heard from Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell and leading trade unionists, who speakers pledged their support for the restoration of Clause 4 and Labour’s commitment to socialist policies. The old Clause 4 – Labour’s commitment to the socialist transformation of society – was an ever-present spectre at this year’s Labour conference. By Labour4Clause4
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!
Sanders Rips ‘Casual Cruelty That Motivates Trump and His Billionaire Friends’ as White House Moves to Strip Free School Lunches From 500,000 Kids The Washington Post reported this week that President Donald Trump’s proposal to strip food stamps from three million Americans could cause a half-million children to lose free school meals “since food stamp eligibility is one way students can qualify for the lunches.” “Trump is depriving 500,000 kids of their school lunches for no damn reason—even after 139 members of Congress warned him not to,” Sanders tweeted, referring to a letter he sent along with House and Senate lawmakers last month condemning the food stamps rule as “unconscionable.” By Jake Johnson
Eugene V Debs on Capitalism
Quotes of the Day: