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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.
The Capitalist Austerity Program = It’s Become the Race to the Botom! The Pauperization of the 99%!
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:
If standing up against the climate and ecological breakdown and for humanity is against the rules, then the rules must be broken.” —Greta Thunberg
. . . an undeclared war under the Clinton presidency which coincided with severe restrictions of our human rights supposedly protected by the Bill of Rights as the first ten amendments to the constitution. . .The Bush administration (Vidal notes) though eerily inept in all but its principal task, which is to exempt the rich from taxes, has casually torn up most of the treaties to which civilized nations subscribe — like the Kyoto Accords or the nuclear missile agreement with Russia. The Bushites go about their relentless plundering of the Treasury and now, thanks to Osama, Social Security (a supposedly untouchable trust fund), which, like Lucky Strike Green, has gone to a war currently costing us $3 billion a month. They have also allowed the FBI and CIA either to run amok or not budge at all, rather like the Wizard of Oz doing his odd pretend-magic tricks while hoping not to be found out. Meanwhile, G.W. booms, ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists’. That’s known as asking for it. . . . Gore Vidal, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (2001)
As the old Woody Guthrie song goes, “Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on? Are you part of the solution or part of the con?” Bullock already scored the worst of any of the presidential candidates on environmental rankings due to his positions on coal and the Keystone XL pipeline. When you add this new travesty to that dismal record — and it will become known nationally — it’s obvious why he will not be the Democrat’s candidate in 2020 nor should ever be considered to hold an environmentally sensitive cabinet-level post. — The Governor, the Mining Company and the Future of a Montana Wilderness
Videos Of the Day:
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.
The First Thing We Do, Let’s Fire All the Cops In the latest shooting of an innocent civilian by a trigger-happy police officer, a white Fort Worth cop blew away a 28-year-old African-American woman through her bedroom window as she played a video game with her eight-year-old nephew. Atatiana Jefferson’s neighbor had called a nonemergency police number to request that they check on her because her doors were wide open. By Ted Rall 
The Image of United States Capitalism: Their President
Civil Rights Are on the Chopping Block in New Supreme Court Term This term, the Supreme Court will decide whether people can be fired for being transgender or LGBQ, if people brought to the U.S. as children can be deported, whether states can impose restrictions on abortion that disproportionately harm poor women, how firm the separation between church and state is, the scope of the Second Amendment and whether criminal defendants can be convicted by less-than-unanimous juries. By Marjorie Cohn
Environment:How Capitalism ‘Solved’ the Nitrogen Crisis (continued) Part Four of Ian Angus’s examination of the disruption of the global nitrogen cycle by an economic system that values profits more than life itself. In the second half of the 20th Century, profit-driven industrial technology turned the nitrogen shortage into an environmentally destructive nitrogen glut. Anyone who has seen the iconic Great Acceleration graphs will recognize the curve on the right — a century of slow growth, followed by a sharp upturn after World War II. Very similar graphs, showing the long-term growth trajectory of CO2 and methane emissions, primary energy use, ocean acidification and other major environmental trends, were produced by the International Biosphere-Geosphere Project in 2004. As the scientists involved pointed out, each of the trends showed a radical increase in pollution and environmental destruction after 1945 — “the most rapid transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind.” By Ian Angus
Just 100 Companies Will Sign Humanity’s Death Warrant Only 100 companies will sign humanity’s death sentence. That’s it. One hundred corporate boards filled with sociopaths. But I’ll get back to that in a moment. But since I aim to please, here’s a point for those of you who don’t give a shit about the climate crisis. The corporations that are screwing up your life, tainting your water, polluting your air, buying up your favorite coffee shop and turning it into a gas station, sucking your tax dollars up through subsidies, and all the while paying their employees a warm can of farts per hour—those corporations are the same ones creating the climate catastrophe. By Lee CampExtinction Rebellion Making Things Inconvenient? Actually, Says Naomi Klein, the Climate Crisis ‘Is Really, Really Inconvenient’ “There is nothing more inconvenient than being hit by a Category 5 hurricane, by having a wildfire raze your town.” latest mobilization with a tenth consecutive day of action, author Naomi Klein pushed back against criticism of the climate protesters and said the climate crisis itself is what’s truly disruptive. In an interview with Sky News presenter Adam Boulton posted Wednesday, Klein refuted the notion that “a lot of action” to address the climate crisis is “being taken by politicians,” saying their lack of sufficient action is what has drawn youth climate and Extinction Rebellion activists into the streets across the world in recent weeks. By Andrea Germanos‘An Ecological Abomination’: Trump Moves to Open Largest Protected Forest in US to Logging Industry “This ecologically rich landscape and critical wildlife habitat will be lost forever if industry is allowed to clear-cut our national forest.” By Julia Conley
Civil Rights/Black Liberation: Labor:Demanding ‘Pay and Benefits That Give Us Dignity,’ 25,000 Chicago Public School Teachers Go on Strike “Our children deserve the best that this city has to offer. They do not deserve broken promises.” By Jake Johnson
What the UAW Labor Bureaucrats ‘Concession Stand’ Proposes
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The four-year contract, the News writes, “is expected to confirm the wind-down of three plants identified last November for closure, the people said. Those plants include Lordstown Assembly in northeast Ohio, Baltimore Operations in Maryland and Warren Transmission in southeast Michigan. Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly would continue to operate, building a new electric truck.” The revelation exposes the bogus claims by UAW Vice President Terry Dittes that the union had “achieved major wins for UAW-GM members.” It also exposes the lie that the UAW is fighting to stop plant closures and preserve the jobs of UAW members.
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The Detroit News further reported that sources “familiar with the situation said the agreement follows the broad contours of the proposals GM publicly detailed twice over the last month.” Only a week ago, the UAW was denouncing these proposals as an insult to autoworkers, which they had supposedly rejected.
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They include wage increases that barely keep pace with inflation — 3 percent base wage increases in two of the years and 4 percent lump-sum bonuses, which are not added to the base rate, the other two years. Raises of 3-4 percent for workers who have suffered a 16 percent decline in real wages since 2010 are identical to those in the sellout contract the UAW rammed through over massive rank-and-file opposition in 2015. In the last three years alone, GM has made $35 billion in North American profits and has squandered at least $10 billion on stock buybacks.
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Sources also report that the deal talks about a three-year “pathway” for temporary part-time workers (TPTs), who make $17 an hour and have few benefits and no rights, to transition to full-time permanent status. Any such provision will be worthless, since there will be nothing to stop the company from laying off part-timers to prevent them from meeting the requirement of a certain number of years of consecutive work. The real purpose of this provision will be to allow GM to rapidly expand part-time and temp labor at the expense of full-time jobs.
A 3% Wage Increase Means Autoworkers Wages Real Wages Will Continue to Fall (See Charts Below)
Shadow Government Statistics Alternate Inflation Charts Alternate Inflation Charts The CPI chart on the home page reflects our estimate of inflation for today as if it were calculated the same way it was in 1990. The CPI on the Alternate-Data Series tab here reflects the CPI as if it were calculated using the methodologies in place in 1980. In general terms, methodological shifts in government reporting have depressed reported inflation, moving the concept of the CPI away from being a measure of the cost of living needed to maintain a constant standard of living.
World:
Half-a-Million Bolivians Attend Morales’ Closing Campaign Rally Nearly half a million Bolivians on Tuesday attended the closing of the presidential campaign of Evo Morales in Santa Cruz, where the Movement for Socialism (MAS) candidate was hosting his event. “We will never forget this rally. SantaCruz is a working, democratic and peaceful people. Those who seek violence are enemies of democracy. The people’s conscience always triumphs over intolerance,” Evo said.
The Kurds are a Nationally Oppressed Minority in Four Countries: Betrayal in the Levant Confusion reigns in certain left-leaning and anarchist circles. Pat Robertson tells Trump he will lose his mandate of heaven if he really does pull the US troops occupying northern Syria from their positions. Democrats, Republicans, neocons and neoliberals join the Pentagon and the mainstream US media to decry this possible troop redeployment. Turkey assembles its military forces and moves into northern Syria. Some of its politicians tell their supporters that they will bury the Kurds in ditches along the roadside. US anarchist Noam Chomsky supports the US troops remaining in the area. What the hell is going on?by Ron Jacobs
Economics:
Two Admitted Felons, UBS and Citigroup, Are Now Gaming Wall Street’s Private Justice System Yesterday, the Public Investors Advocate Bar Association (PIABA) Foundation released a research study showing that Wall Street’s banks and brokerage firms are back to their old tricks again in gaming the private justice system that its crony self-regulator, FINRA, has carved out for the benefit of Wall Street to the detriment of Main Street. PIABA previously exposed how FINRA, when it was called NASD, rigged the selection process for picking arbitrators so that the croniest ones kept getting selected. PIABA released this statement on July 20, 2000:By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
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!
In her op-ed, Koshgarian acknowledged that remaking the U.S. military as a truly “defense-based institution, rather than a war machine and A.T.M. for private contractors, will require major changes.” But, she wrote, “that’s no excuse for continuing to spend hundreds of billions in ways that make our world more dangerous and deny us the ability to seriously invest in things like jobs, healthcare, education, and all that makes our lives better.” — Researchers Detail How Slashing Pentagon Budget Could Pay for Medicare for All While Creating Progressive Foreign Policy Americans Want
Quotes of the Day: