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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.
Always Remember That Obamba Supported the Wall Street Bailout and Remember That President Obama, With a Majority Democrat Legislature, Started the United States Capitalist Austerity Program — The Race to the Botom or 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:
Quotes of the Day:
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 End of Accountable Government Is Close at Hand For about 70 years the CIA has been undermining a free press. It began with Operation Mockingbird, a Cold War operation against communism. The CIA recruited journalists into a propaganda network. The CIA paid journalists to write fake stories or to publish stories written by the CIA in order to control explanations that served the agency’s agendas. Student and cultural organizations and intellectual magazines, such as Encounter, were suborned into the CIA’s propaganda network. Thanks to the German journalist, Udo Ulfkotte, we know that every European journalist of any significance is a CIA asset. In 1977 Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame wrote in Rolling Stone that the CIA “has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers — both English and foreign language — which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives.” Like most other people, Western journalists were all too willing to sell out their integrity for money. The few who were not were blackmailed into submission. The few honest journalists who remain have been forced out of the “mainstream” or presstitute media onto Internet websites. Wikileaks is by far the best news organization of our time. To bring this organization to heel Washington, using its Swedish, British, and Ecuadoran vassals, has persecuted Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, for years. The CIA’s media vassals, including the New York Times and The Guardian, both of which published the material leaked to Wikileaks that is being used to destroy Assange, have joined wholeheartedly in the persecution of the World’s Best and Most Honest Journalist. By Paul Craig Roberts
What Wrong With The United States?:
Andrew Yang asked a rhetorical question to his San Francisco presidential campaign rally audience Sunday on a subject that was on everyone’s minds: Why are wildfires and shut-offs happening in the most technologically advanced country in the world? The answer, Yang said, “are four words: P, G and E. I think those are technically words. A letter is a word, actually, when you do it like that,” he quipped, as he often did in a 50-minute speech that veered from wonky policy proposals to extemporaneous one-liners. Then Yang, who has shocked the keepers of conventional wisdom with the endurance and growth of his campaign, turned serious about Pacific Gas and Electric Co. “But PG&E is an emblem,” Yang said. “We know exactly what their incentives are: Their incentives are to cut corners and try and make as much money as possible for their shareholders.” “You cut corners long enough, and then we all pay the price,” Yang said. “That is an emblem of what is happening in our country today. Everything revolves around the almighty dollar. If you’re a PG&E executive, you don’t get paid based upon our well-being. You get paid based on whether you can cut corners successfully enough to add another couple dimes to the bottom line.” — Presidential candidate Andrew Yang rips PG&E as ‘emblem of what’s gone wrong’
Government Arming and Bombing the World? Data for Progress for quite a while appeared to be yet another U.S. PEP group (Progressive Except for Peace). They were producing useful polling reports on all sorts of topics as if 96% of humanity didn’t exist. Foreign policy just couldn’t be found. They told me they were just getting around to it. You still can’t find it from the homepage of their website (or at least it’s beyond my navigational skills), but Data for Progress has now published a report called “Voters Want to See a Progressive Overhaul of American Foreign Policy.” By David Swanson
A Reminder Following Baghdadi’s Death: ‘The Terrorists We’re Killing Today Are the Terrorists We Created Yesterday’ “Nobody is better than the U.S. at killing terrorists. Nobody is better than the U.S. at creating terrorists.” “Nobody is better than the U.S. at killing terrorists. Nobody is better than the U.S. at creating terrorists,” tweeted author and peace activist Medea Benjamin on Sunday. “The cycle continues. The weapons companies get rich. Children—yes, including Bagdadi’s children—die.” By Jon Queally
Environment:
My Exodus From the Northern California Fires This is history in the making. It is history made by the forces of nature, especially the winds that were expected to reach 75 mph at the higher elevations. It is also history made by human beings, who have built towns and homes where they ought not to have been built, at least not in close proximity to one another, and history made by PG&E, the giant utility, that has put greed above safety, as Governor Gavin Newsom and others have pointed out. By Jonah Raskin
PG&E Knew for Years Its Lines Could Spark Wildfires, and Didn’t Fix Them Documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal show that the utility has long been aware that parts of its 18,500-mile transmission system were dangerously outdated PG&E Corp. knew for years that hundreds of miles of high-voltage power lines could fail and spark fires, yet it repeatedly failed to perform the necessary upgrades. Documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal under the Freedom of Information Act and in connection with a regulatory dispute over PG&E’s spending on its electrical grid show that the company has long been aware that parts of its 18,500-mile transmission system have reached the end of their useful lives. The failure last year of a century-old transmission line that sparked a wildfire, killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise wasn’t an aberration, the documents show. A year earlier, PG&E executives conceded to a state lawyer that the company needed to process many projects, all at once, to prevent system failures—a problem they said could be likened to a “pig in the python.” By Katherine Blunt and Russell Gold
To Make the Palanet Warmer: Trump Admin Proposes New Rule to Allow Shipping Flammable LNG by Rail President Trump has made clear that he wants to move the nation’s glut of fracked natural gas onto trains and then to ships for sale abroad. In response to Trump’s April executive order pushing federal agencies to make that happen, the Department of Transportation (DOT) on October 18 announced a proposed rule for what it calls the “safe transportation of liquefied natural gas [LNG] by rail tank car.” However, the proposed rule does not include any new safety regulations or require any safety testing for moving large quantities of this flammable cargo. Instead, the rule, coming from the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) and Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), would allow the rail industry to move LNG in rail tank cars, labeled DOT-113, currently used to ship small quantities of other flammable gases super-cooled into liquid form. By Justin Mikulka
week 144: trump wants to turn alaska’s tongass rainforest into a drive-thru Trump Can’t See the Forest for the Logging The U.S. Forest Service announced on Tuesday its support for lifting the ban on road-building in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. Located in southeastern Alaska, the temperate rainforest is a vast, largely intact wilderness that stores more carbon per acre than any other forest on earth. The Trump administration’s move would lead to logging, habitat fragmentation, and potentially oil and gas exploration in the nation’s largest—and one of the world’s most important—rainforests. . By Brian Palmer
The Drug Trade Isn’t Just Killing People, But The Planet Itself
There are just 15 vaquita porpoises left in the Gulf of California, and in just a few months, that number could plummet to zero. The earth’s most endangered whale has become a victim not only of the usual environmental suspects, but, due to the fact that its habitat in the Sea of Cortez is also home to the totoaba, a valuable fish, it has been caught up in none other than the drug trade. By Robert Scheer
River Of Trash: How Plastic Pollution Is Making Central American Communities Uninhabitable The fishermen stand thigh-deep in the muddy water as our boat pulls up to the shore, grass shushing against the hull. It is a still, cool morning and mist wicks off the river as the sun begins to rise above the trees. Down the beach, a white egret standing in the shallows takes flight in a burst of sound as the fishermen lift their net to reveal its glinting catch. Beside them, half-submerged, a plastic soda bottle noses purposefully past, toward the sea. As I step onto shore, I notice more bits of plastic lying among the reeds, half-buried in the mud, as well as stained scraps of cloth, bits of packing foam, a single cracked plastic sandal. Just beyond, Guatemala’s Motagua River pours into the Caribbean, carrying with it a daily freight of trash washed out of overcrowded city dumps and unofficial landfills hundreds of miles upstream. By Amelia Urry
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Labor:
Teacher Strike Confronts Chicago’s Long History of Racial Injustice As a teacher employed by the Chicago Public Schools, I know how indefensible the current situation is: We have a district where nurses are spread between multiple schools, counselors have caseloads of students nearing 1,000, and 45 students cram into a single classroom in some schools. This has been the status quo for far too long. The Chicago Teachers Union’s demands for this contract are not typical. We are not only negotiating over pay. We are also seeking to right the historical wrongs in the Chicago Public Schools and the communities we serve. That is why we are pushing for more counselors, nurses, librarians and social workers in every school. By Kenzo Shibata
Economy:
EU Launches Investigation Into Britain For Letting Multinational Corporations Avoid Tax Government introduced new tax loophole for multinationals in 2013 The European Commission has opened an investigation into alleged special treatment given to big multinational companies by the British Government and its tax authorities.The UK has allowed some multinationals to “opt out” of key parts of its tax avoidance crackdown that applies to other companies – a move the EU says could breach state-aid rules about special treatment. The EU probe comes shortly after the Commission ruled that tech company Apple must pay Ireland €13bn (£11bn) in back taxes – against the wishes of the Irish government. By Jon Stone
The Fed Fears an Explosion on Wall Street: Here’s How JPMorgan Lit the Fuse JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the United States with $1.6 trillion in deposits from more than 5,000 retail bank branches spread across the country. When it withdraws liquidity from the U.S. financial system, that has a reverberating impact. According to the filings that JPMorgan Chase makes annually with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), since 2013 JPMorgan Chase has spent $77 billion buying back its own stock. That includes the whopping $17.01 billion it has spent in just the first nine months of this year buying back its stock. But here’s the shocking news. According to its SEC filings, JPMorgan Chase is partly using Federally insured deposits made by moms and pops across the country in its more than 5,000 branches to prop up its share price with buybacks. The wording in the filing is as follows: By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Over 1 Million Chileans Take to the Streets to Demand Political Reforms, Change to Country’s Neoliberal Economic System Chile is not the same as it was yesterday.” Chilean President Sebastián Piñera on Saturday said he would reshuffle his cabinet after over 1 million Chileans poured into city streets across the country Friday to demand structural reforms to the country’s government and economic system. By Eoin Higgins
Lebanon Protesters Form Human Chain Amid Economic Crisis Demonstrators are furious at a sectarian ruling elite they accuse of plundering state resources for personal gain.Protesters formed a human chain across Lebanon on Sunday, pressing a historic wave of demonstrations against political leaders blamed for corruption and steering the country towards economic collapse. With the crisis in its second week, there was no sign of moves by the government towards a compromise with protesters whose demands include its resignation. 
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!
Freedom and slavery: the birth of capital Capital emerged on the stage of history “dripping blood from every pore” – to use Marx’s famous words. Josh Holroyd describes the violent and tumultuous birth of capitalism out of the embers of feudal society. By Josh Holroyd
Transmission Towers From a Century Ago Posed a Danger, and PG&E Knew It