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Since World War I, ‘the war to end all wars’, there have been perpetual wars for perpetual peace, this Laura Gray’s cartoon from the front page of The Militant August 18, 1945, under banner headline: “There Is No Peace” Could Still Be Published Today!
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:
Images of the Day:
One of my early clients was a large manufacturer of commercial airplanes, who had developed an econometric model for predicting revenue passenger miles. The level of revenue passenger miles was their primary sales forecasting tool, and the model was heavily dependent on the GNP (now GDP) as reported by the Department of Commerce. Suddenly, their model stopped working, and they asked me if I could fix it. I realized the GNP numbers were faulty, corrected them for my client (official reporting was similarly revised a couple of years later) and the model worked again, at least for a while, until GNP methodological changes eventually made the underlying data worthless.— John Williams, Shadow Government Statistics
The Fed is Forever ‘Blowing Bubbles’: The singular source of the bubble is of course the Federal “Reserve”. The Fed has no reserves; its only assets are mostly worthless paper. Nonetheless, it creates “money” and shovels it to the top tier banks, dealers and other favored entities. Loan demand is slight to non-existent, and therefore these institutions, lacking other credit worthy places to employ the money, have no recourse but to buy stocks, stocks and more stocks. The financial world has been so squeezed into this singularity that it is the only game in town. . . . The real catastrophic threat is that these bubble stocks will blow rather simultaneously, and when they do blow they will have a good chance to devastate the entire stock market, the financial markets, and the economy. This junk as well as all the more rationally priced “good stocks” will be liquidated to meet margin calls, balance sheet requirements and all the other hardwiring needs of the financial markets. There will be a manic and panicked scramble to salvage anything. The balloon blowing Federal Reserve has only itself to blame, but the entire populace will suffer immeasurably when the convulsion occurs. — The Bubble Machine
The Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation was supposed to put an end to the Federal Reserve’s unaccountable bailouts of Wall Street’s trading houses. The Federal Reserve’s mandate is to be a lender-of-last-resort to deposit-taking banks, not trading casinos. And yet, here we are again today dealing with secret trading losses and the Fed’s secret bailouts to unnamed trading houses on Wall Street. Making the situation at Morgan Stanley even more dicey, it owns two Federally-insured deposit taking banks that the U.S. taxpayer is on the hook for. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Morgan Stanley Bank, National Association holds $116 billion in deposits while Morgan Stanley Private Bank, N.A. holds another $70 billion in deposits. If you’re thinking this is the banking structure from hell, you would be spot on. — The New York Fed Has Some Explaining to Do Over Morgan Stanley’s Unreported Trading Losses
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.
Report Details How Social Security Has Become Rigged for the Wealthy While Leaving Behind Those It Was Designed to Help The benefits of Social Security, a program designed to help vulnerable and low-income people, have since the 1980s become increasingly skewed toward the wealthy due to demographic shifts and soaring inequality, according to a new report. Proponents of Social Security expansion, responding to the report (pdf) by Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, said the New Deal-era program’s increasing regressivity was not inevitable, but the result of lawmakers’ refusal to enact basic progressive reforms such as lifting the cap on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax. By Jake Johnso
Can the US Get Out of Its Endless Wars? Donald Trump in 2016 ran in opposition to the Iraq war and more generally to massive US commitments around the world. His denunciations of “endless wars” resonated enough that many voters ignored his documented early support for the Afghan and Iraq wars. Indeed, areas where casualties in those wars were highest voted more heavily for Trump than other demographic and economic factors would have predicted. Voters, with plenty of justification from her record as Secretary of State, thus pegged Hillary Clinton as a warmonger By Richard Lachmann
Fiqures Don’t Lie, But Liars Can‘Figure’ Dept.: Trump Tax Records Reveal New Inconsistencies — This Time for Trump Tower Donald Trump’s business reported conflicting information about a key metric to New York City property tax officials and a lender who arranged financing for his signature building, Trump Tower in Manhattan, according to tax and loan documents obtained by ProPublica. The findings add a third major Trump property to two for which ProPublica revealed similar discrepancies last month. In the latest case, the occupancy rate of the Trump Tower’s commercial space was listed, over three consecutive years, as 11, 16 and 16 percentage points higher in filings to a lender than in reports to city tax officials, records show. By Heather Vogell
Environment:
At COP 25 Kickoff, Spain’s Socialist Leader Rips ‘Fanatics’ Like Trump Who Deny Climate Crisis “No one can escape this challenge by themselves. There is no wall that can protect any country, regardless of how powerful it is.” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez kicked off COP 25 in Madrid, Spain on Monday by condemning the “handful of fanatics” who continue to deny the reality of the climate crisis as it wreaks havoc across the globe and threatens to render large swathes of the planet uninhabitable.Sánchez, leader of the Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and proponent of a Green New Deal for Spain, did not condemn any nations or world leaders by name. But Sánchez implored the international community to combat “alternative facts,” an apparent shot at the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. By Jake Johnson
After Hottest Decade Since Records Began, WMO Warns World May Face 5°C Rise by Century’s End The impacts of the climate crisis “are real and happening now and place huge pressures on communities and countries,” climate scientists said. As the decade comes to a close, the world’s top climate scientists warned Tuesday that policymakers’ continued failure to curb the warming of the planet could lead to a global temperature increase of 5° Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century and put the world “nowhere near on track” to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis. By Julia Conley
From Whither Humanity? The Environmental Crisis of CapitalismAn increase of this magnitude (20 degrees Fahrenheit) would flood most cities and industrial centers in the world as the ice caps melt into the sea raising the sea level. According to theU.S. Geological Survey3, if all of the ice caps melted, it is estimated that sea level could rise more than 80 meters or 262 feet. The potential catastrophic results of global warming and the threat to humanity’s future should become an immediate concern. Table 1. Estimated potential maximum sea-level rise from the total melting of present-day glaciers. 
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
US Taxpayers Spent Almost $1 Billion Incarcerating Innocent Black People Over the last few weeks, the Rodney Reed case has ignited a firestorm of interest, as celebrities, activists, and politicians worked to delay his Nov. 20 execution on the basis that he might be innocent. After facing mounting pressure, a Texas appeals court granted Reed a stay of execution, allowing him to fight allegations that he committed murder more than two decades ago. If he succeeds, Reed would be another of the thousands of black men the United States has paid hundreds of millions to incarcerate. According to the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE), since 1989, 2,515 men and women have been exonerated after proving their innocence. In total, among all known exonerees, Americans have shelled out a staggering $4.12 billion to incarcerate innocent men and women since 1989, according to a Yahoo Finance analysis. That’s largely money spent on trials, and the cost of housing inmates in prison. According to the Bureau of Prisons, in the fiscal year 2017, the average cost to house a prisoner was over $36,000 a year in federal facilities. But black men make up the majority of those wrongfully convicted — approximately 49%. And since 1989, taxpayers have wasted $944 million to incarcerate black men and women that were later found to be innocent. That number climbs to $1.2 billion when including Hispanic men and women.
The New ‘Black Codes’ The police forces in impoverished urban communities, equipped with military-grade weapons and empowered to harass and kill largely at will, along with mass incarceration, are the principal tools for the social control of the poor. There is little pretense of justice and even less of protection and safety. The corporate state and our oligarchic rulers fear a backlash from those they abandoned in deindustrialized enclaves across the country, what Malcolm X called our “internal colonies.” The daily brutality and terror keep the poor, especially poor people of color, in bondage. On average, more than 1,100 people, or one every eight hours, almost all unarmed, are killed every year by police in the United States. These killings are not accidents. They are not the results of a failed system. The system works exactly as it is designed to work. And until the system of corporate power is destroyed, nothing will change for the poor, or the rest of Americans. Every police reform going back decades, including due process, Miranda rights and protocols for filing charges, has only resulted in increased police power and resources. Our national conversation on race and crime, which refuses to confront the economic, social and political systems of exploitation and white supremacy, has been a whitewash. The vast pools of the unemployed and underemployed, especially among people of color, are part of the design of predatory corporate capitalism. And so are the institutions, especially the police, the courts, the jails and the prisons, tasked with maintaining social control of those the system has cast aside. By Chris Hedges
- Mumia to Address December 9 Conference in Philadelphia The nation’s best known political prisoner will mark his 38th year behind bars by addressing a “Youth Rise Up Against Empire” event in his hometown. Mumia Abu Jamal credits the late Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” with inspiring his latest, three-volume work: “Murder Incorporated,” a history of US imperial crimes. Abu Jamal and co-author Stephen Vittoria loved Zinn’s “ideas about what was called ‘history from below’ – how average, everyday people built movements for freedom and human rights.”
- A “Fighting United Front” for Community Control of Police Eight hundred delegates to the newly re-founded National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression chose veteran organizer Frank Chapman as their executive director, last month. “This was a powerful conference, indicative of the fact that there’s a powerful movement building up in our country for community control of police,” said Chapman, who helped keep the Chicago chapter of the Alliance going after the national organization was disbanded in Nineties. Chapman calls the new Alliance “a fighting united front, because 99.9 percent of the people who were in that room are activists. They’re not just ready to fight – they are fighting.”
- Dr Gerald Horne: Africans See China as Counterweight to US and EuropeIn contrast to US hysteria over China’s growing role in world affairs, “in Africa itself, it’s felt that there needs to be a counterweight to the North Atlantic powers, and they feel that China helps play that role – as does Russia, too,” said Dr Gerald Horne, the prolific author and professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Houston.
- Haitians Blame US and France for Corrupt Regime Daoud Andre, of the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti, said the “clear demand” animating protests that have shut down much of the country is that President “Jovenal Moise must go,” but also that there must be a change in “the system.” Haiti has been “turned into a shithole by France and the United States,” who put a succession of puppets like Moise in power, said Andre.
Labor:
The Federal Government Keeps Cheating Retired Seniors— The Federal Government’s ever-changing cost of living index.: Retired workers living on social security, are cheated out of social security wage increases by 5%, if you used how the government ‘figured’ the social security increased in 1990, and by 8% how it was ‘figured’ in 1980. Our ‘labor leaders have remained silent in their duty to their partners. The graphs below demonstrate the 1% government’s sleight of hand.The Cost of Living Social Security Raise I Did Not Get:
Shadow Government Statistics 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. Further definition is provided in our CPI Glossary.
Economy:
The New York Fed Has Some Explaining to Do Over Morgan Stanley’s Unreported Trading Losses James Gorman is the Chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley. He also sits on the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed), one of Morgan Stanley’s regulators.The New York Fed is one of 12 regional Federal Reserve banks – but the only one willing to turn on a multi-trillion dollar money funnel to Wall Street’s mega banks when they need a secret bailout. Since September 17 of this year, the New York Fed has pumped upwards of $3 trillion in revolving loans to trading houses on Wall Street, without naming which firms are getting the money and why they’re getting it. From December 2007 to the middle of 2010, the New York Fed turned on its money funnel to Wall Street to the tune of $29 trillion – a fact it battled in court for years to keep secret. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Big Business Lines Up Behind The Tories To Stop Corbyn Boris Johnson is far from the ideal representative of big business, with his threats to crash Britain out of the EU. But the bosses and bankers are even more afraid of the threat posed by a Corbyn Labour government. s the temperature rises in this general election, the battle lines have become ever clearer. On one side is the mass Corbyn movement of workers and youth. And on the other, the rich and powerful have assembled firmly behind their party, the Conservatives. By Nick Hallsworth,
After Evo, the Lithium Question Looms Large in Bolivia Over the past 13 years, Morales has tried to build a different relationship between his country and its resources. He has not wanted the resources to benefit the transnational mining firms, but rather to benefit his own population. Part of that promise was met as Bolivia’s poverty rate has declined, and as Bolivia’s population was able to improve its social indicators. Nationalization of resources combined with the use of its income to fund social development has played a role. The attitude of the Morales government toward the transnational firms produced a harsh response from them, many of them taking Bolivia to court. Over the course of the past few years, Bolivia has struggled to raise investment to develop the lithium reserves in a way that brings the wealth back into the country for its people. Morales’ Vice President Álvaro García Linera had said that lithium is the “fuel that will feed the world.” Bolivia was unable to make deals with Western transnational firms; it decided to partner with Chinese firms. This made the Morales government vulnerable. It had walked into the new Cold War between the West and China. The coup against Morales cannot be understood without a glance at this clash. By Vijay Prashad
Education, Health, Science, 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
So If You’re Poor, You’re Dead’? Watch These Brits Gasp When They Find Out Cost of Healthcare in the United States “The cost of American healthcare is literally unimaginable to most British people.”Britons in a video released Tuesday expressed incredulity and shock at the high cost of healthcare in the United States and thanked the United Kingdom’s publicly-funded and administered National Health Service for sparing the country’s people such exorbitant prices. “So if you’re poor, you’re dead,” one young woman tells the interviewer from Joe Politics after hearing an asthma inhaler in the for-profit U.S. system costs between $250 and $300. By Eoin Higgins
Quotes of the Day:
Black Agenda Radio for Week of December 2, 2019 With Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford