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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:
Cuba’s medical brigades were instrumental in controlling the Ebola epidemic in Africa, a feat acknowledged by the World Health Organization. Cuba has one of the highest physician-to-population ratios in the world, the longevity of its population is comparable to that of the United States, and the Cuban people receive free healthcare, education, housing and pensions — along with employment security. Cuba has virtually no drug trafficking, homelessness, illiteracy or malnutrition. Its advances in biotechnology stand alone in Latin America as a symbol of what a small nation with very limited resources can do. These accomplishments were achieved despite a punishing, 56-year embargo perpetrated by the world’s most powerful nation. — Opinion: Universal Healthcare, No Illiteracy And Other Cuban Feats Under A U.S. Embargo
So why do America’s disastrous wars persist? I can think of many reasons, some obvious and easy to understand, like the endless pursuit of profit through weapons sales for those very wars, and some more subtle but no less significant, like a deep-seated conviction in Washington that a willingness to wage war is a sign of national toughness and seriousness. Before I go on, though, here’s another distinctive aspect of our forever-war moment: Have you noticed that peace is no longer even a topic in America today? The very word, once at least part of the rhetoric of Washington politicians, has essentially dropped out of use entirely. Consider the current crop of Democratic candidates for president. One, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, wants to end regime-change wars, but is otherwise a self-professed hawk on the subject of the war on terror. Another, Senator Bernie Sanders, vows to end “endless wars” but is careful to express strong support for Israel and the ultra-expensive F-35 fighter jet. The other dozen or so tend to make vague sounds about cutting defense spending or gradually withdrawing U.S. troops from various wars, but none of them even consider openly speaking of peace. And the Republicans? While President Trump may talk of ending wars, since his inauguration he’s sent more troops to Afghanistan and into the Middle East, while greatly expanding drone and other air strikes, something about which he openly boasts. — American Exceptionalism Is Making Earth Uninhabitable
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.
My Forefathers and The 1%’s Forefathers II. Forefathers of the 1st American Counter-Revolution The American Revolutionary War lasted eight years, from initial skirmishes in 1775 to 1783. A Constitutional Convention was called in 1787, to draft the constitution. Those whom, the powers that be, now call the ‘Forefathers of the Constitution’, were the ones who led the counter-call to the Declaration of Independence. Instead of codifying the constitution to guarantee our “certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, they refused to include the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights and even the 1689 English Bill of Rights in the original draft of the constitution! Due to the revolutionary consciousness at that time, it became very clear that the States would not ratify the constitution, these ‘forefathers’ had to declared that the first act of congress would be the enactment of the Bill of Rights, in order to get the states to approved the constitution. (Rhode Island held out, until the actual deed was done.)Never the less, the constitution was written to allow only white males of property to vote, legalized slavery, and stated that Black People were only 4/5 human. By RolandSheppard
Complicity With Imperialism Is Holding Back the Anti-Trump Resistance In their efforts to dump President Trump, many Democrats and other liberal critics of Trump have been recycling the same imperialist ideology that produced him. In the impeachment hearings, Democrats have accused Trump of withholding military aid to Ukraine to extract personal political favors, thereby compromising efforts to combat “Vladimir Putin’s desire to rebuild a Russian empire,” in the words of House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff. For many of these same politicians, however, the U.S.’s own crimes of empire are not only unimpeachable, but unacknowledged. By Azeezah Kanji
‘What Cruelty Looks Like’: Trump Finalizes Plan to Strip Food Aid From 750,000 Low-Income People by 2020 “When it came to tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, Trump felt the nation’s finances were firm enough to give up more than $1,500,000,000,000. When it’s time to spend a fraction of that to help poor people eat, that’s when the well has supposedly run dry.” By Jake Johnson
Environment:
Wealthy Countries’ Approach to Climate Change Condemns Hundreds of Millions of People to Suffer In Madrid, Spain, the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference—known as COP25—began on December 2. Representatives of the world’s countries gathered to discuss what is decidedly a serious problem for the planet; no one, except dangerous political forces in the neofascist right, denies the reality of climate change. In Madrid, Spain, the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference—known as COP25—began on December 2. Representatives of the world’s countries gathered to discuss what is decidedly a serious problem for the planet; no one, except dangerous political forces in the neofascist right, denies the reality of climate change. What prevents a transfer from carbon-based fuel to other fuels is not the stubbornness of this or that country. The main problems are three: 1) The right wing that denies climate change; 2) Sections of the energy industry that have a vested interest in the continuation of the use of carbon-based fuels; 3) The refusal by the Western advanced countries to admit both that they have caused the problem and that they should use their vast wealth to finance the transfer from carbon-based fuels to other fuels in countries whose wealth has been siphoned off to the West. By Vijay Prashad
Palm Oil in Snack Foods Could Be Destroying the World’s “Orangutan Capital” Picture a rhinoceros in the rainforest, add a herd of elephants, families of orangutans swinging through the treetops and tigers prowling the understory, and there is only one place in the world you could be. Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem is one of Earth’s most ancient forest ecosystems, a laboratory of life’s potential where the alchemy of evolution has been allowed to experiment, uninterrupted for millennia. And the results are stounding. Green upon green, vines hanging from towering old-growth trees, moss rowing on ferns growing on bromeliads… you get the picture. It is the kind of place one imagines primeval nature to be wild, abundant, impenetrable. By Laurel Sutherlin
The Imperial Oil Files: New Collection Adds to Climate and Energy Research Archives On Science and Denial Today, DeSmog and the Climate Investigations Center are co-launching a large collection of documents from Exxon’s Canadian subsidiary, Imperial Oil, that DeSmog collected from a company archive in Calgary over the past several years. These documents add new context to the groundbreaking investigative reporting by Inside Climate News, and the Columbia School of Journalism in partnership with the Los Angeles Times, that revealed the #ExxonKnew conspiracy. Those journalistic efforts exposed the facts that Exxon’s own climate science research had confirmed the role of fossil fuels in driving global warming, and that the company pivoted away from that advanced knowledge, choosing instead to spend tens of millions of dollars funding climate science denial campaigns. While most of the media attention has focused on ExxonMobil, this new archive provides further proof that Imperial Oil was also well-versed in climate science and the consequences of fossil fuel pollution in altering global climate By Brendan DeMelle
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
After the assassination of Martin Luther King and the subsequent rebellions in the inner cities protesting his assassination, the Democratic Party’s “war on poverty” started laying dollars on any potential Black leaders and grooming Black Candidates. After the assassination of Martin Luther King and the subsequent rebellions in the inner cities protesting his assassination, the Democratic Party’s “war on poverty” started laying dollars on any potential Black leaders and grooming Black Candidates. John Lewis, formally of SNCC, became enlightened, he ignored the Black Panthers and saw the Democratic Party, symbolized by a jackass, as his party. Most of what W.E. B. Dubois described as the “talented tenth” were bought off by this process. The more radical concepts that Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had developed at the time of their deaths disappeared from the scene. No one took up where they left off. The governmental policy, directed towards the ‘leaders’ of the civil rights movement, of the carrot (dollarism) and the stick (assassinations) had proven to be successful. — Roland Sheppard. The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement
“Booming” Economy Means Faster Race to the Bottom For the past two generations, no matter which party has been in power, the US economy has produced more and more “bad” jobs – because the Race to the Bottom is ruling class policy. “Whole sectors have become precarity zones.” A Brookings Institution study shows 44 percent of all American workers toil in “low-wage” jobs, with median earnings of $18,000 a year. Most of them are adults in their prime working years, whose paychecks provide the main sustenance for their families, 20 percent of which live at below 150 percent of the poverty line. Blacks and Latinos are overrepresented in low-paid employment, but more than half of these bad jobs are held by whites. By Glen Ford, BAR executive editor
Freedom Rider: Liberals Love the Military Self-styled liberals believe they are a better class of people than Trump, but are bigger supporters of unjust wars than the so-called “deplorables.” “Liberals eagerly wait for a war they can believe in.”The trauma of Donald Trump’s presidency has created continued insanity for American liberals. They were never very trustworthy, due to their abiding belief in United States exceptionalism and an imagined right for it to intervene in the rest of the world as it pleased. Liberals could be counted on to protest wars which killed Americans in Vietnam or in Iraq. But by and large they trust in imperialist dictates if someone they like is in charge and who doesn’t allow too many of their countrymen to get hurt. By Margaret Kimberley , BAR editor and senior columnist
Colin Kaepernick Shows that American Innocence is a White Supremacist Sport The Black struggle for dignity and self-determination will forever be criminalized as a problem by the white elite and their hirelings in the Black misleadership class. “We must hold Black servants of the American Empire accountable.” Colin Kaepernick hasn’t played an NFL game in more than three seasons. The 32-year-old quarterback was vanquished from the NFL in 2016 for his protest of police brutality during the pre-game national anthem ceremony. In mid-November, Kaepernick was invited to a workout in Atlanta by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. Goodell offered the workout in exchange for a signed waiver that would have prevented Kaepernick from taking future legal action against the NFL. The NFL further demanded that Kaepernick participate in the workout without the presence of the media. By BAR Contributing Editor Danny Haiphong
Millions Die in Congo While the UN Keeps the Peace The UN Peacekeeping Mission has been in Congo for 20 years without protecting the people or the peace. “Rwanda is responsible for what is going wrong in the peace in Congo!” In its most recent report to the UN Security Council, the UN Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) blandly recounted “progress” in service to their mission, but what is their mission? Up until 2013, MONUSCO had no combat mandate; they were somehow expected to keep the peace amidst a war for Congo’s resources without one. In 2013, however, as the M23 militia was ravaging North and South Kivu Provinces, the UN Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) reported that M23 answered to the command of Rwandan Defense Minister James Kabarebe, who of course answered to Rwandan President Paul Kagame himself. There were competing factions within M23, and some of its officers answered to high-level officials in Uganda, who of course answered to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. By Contributing Editor Ann Garrison 
GOOD AND DEAD . . . Chicago’s heart beats
blood power control
from the Haymarket riot (1887)
to cops ordered
to shoot to kill or maim arsonists
cripple looters in the King Riots (April 1968)
to the whole world’s watching
Democratic Convention police riot (August 1968)
to Chairman Fred’s targeted murder a year later
to Laquan McDonald shot sixteen times (2014)
(the police killing video
suppressed for 13 months)
the Panthers at least challenged
as best they could
what a recent report calls
a culture of “excessive violence”
within the Chicago Police Department
the beat goes on . . . By Gary Johnson
Where the Bodies Are Buried Descendants of survivors of a 1910 massacre of Blacks in East Texas vow not to rest until the victims bodies have been found. “The killings in Slocum were emblematic of the kind of white-on-black violence that shaped the region and the state.” A twisting, tree-lined road carried Constance Hollie-Jawaid and her family through the dense forest until they reached Slocum, a small unincorporated town dug into the Piney Woods of East Texas. A few miles southeast of the old high school, past two trickling creeks, the family pulled off the road near a small red farmhouse. A thick, leafy canopy shielded them from the cloudless midsummer heat as they exited their cars and began to quietly pace along the red fence. By Michael Barajas 
How to Commit War Crimes – and Get Away With It Not only should war crimes charges be brought against the US and UK, but these aggressor nations’ political leaders should face imprisonment. “There have been no serious ICC investigations of any power that is closely aligned with the United States.” U.S. President Donald Trump sacked his Navy secretary on Twitter. The main reason is that the Navy secretary did not follow Trump’s advice regarding Navy Special Warfare Operator Edward Gallagher. Trump wanted Gallagher to retain his position as a Navy Seal. Gallagher was accused of stabbing to death a wounded fighter of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) in 2017; he was also accused of other incidents of murder (of a schoolgirl and an elderly man), and then of obstruction of justice. In July 2019, a military court acquitted Gallagher of most of the charges but found him guilty of posing with the body of the fighter who had been stabbed to death. By Vijay Prashad 
Brown Privilege in Africa Inadequate attention seems to have been paid to the significance of racial miscegenation (or us “in-betweeners”) in the process of domination. “It is unfashionable to be associated with anything African at the moment.”“Coloured” in Africa denotes something other than what it denotes in America, though it can mean the same skin tone for many on both continents at times. A coloured in most parts of Africa is the offspring of a black person and either a European or Asian (traditionally Indian, but yes, recently increasing numbers of Chinese). I am coloured in the African senseBy Zanga Chimombo
Ukrainian Roulette: The “Ukrainegate” Gamble Liberals have enlisted the CIA to repudiate a clearly obscene and grotesque president because they themselves are obscene and grotesque in many of the same ways. “Trump’s more serious violations are not pursued as crimes because they are common practice by both the liberal and conservative parties.”By allying with the intelligence community, national security state, and corporate media to engineer a soft coup against Donald Trump, liberal democrats have signaled allegiance to our nation’s most antidemocratic and unaccountable forces. “Ukrainegate” is not a progressive push for justice and equality under the law, but an expression of a divide amongst our ruling class between a neoconservative foreign policy wing (to which establishment Democrats and Republicans belong) and an “America First” xenophobic isolationism represented by Donald Trump and his supporters in Washington.By Enzo Calandra
The Pervasive Power of the Settler Mindset The destructive premise at the core of the American settler narrative is that freedom is built upon the violent elimination of other peoples. “The challenges of undoing settler ethics have never been higher. In the spring of 1774, two members of the Shawnee tribe allegedly robbed and murdered a Virginia settler. As Thomas Jefferson recounts in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), “The neighboring whites, according to their custom, undertook to punish this outrage in a summary way.”By Nikhil Pal Singh
Labor:
Even as the U.S. economy hums along at a favorable pace, there is a vast segment of workers today earning wages low enough to leave their livelihood and families extremely vulnerable. That’s one of the main takeaways from our new analysis, in which we found that 53 million Americans between the ages of 18 to 64—accounting for 44% of all workers—qualify as “low-wage.” Their median hourly wages are $10.22, and median annual earnings are about $18,000. — Low-Wage Work Is More Pervasive Than You Think, And There Aren’t Enough “Good Jobs” To Go Around More
Economy:
In the Midst of the Biggest Wall Street Bailout Since the Financial Crisis, the Fed Presents Alice-in-Wonderland Testimony for Today’s House HearingThe titular head of bank supervision for the Federal Reserve is Randal Quarles. We use the term, titular, because the job was so amorphous that President Obama never bothered to fill the slot, even though it was legally mandated under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010. Everyone on Wall Street knows that it’s the all-powerful New York Fed that “supervises” the behemoth banks on Wall Street. Last week New York Times’ reporter Jeanna Smialek accurately summed up the real job of Randal Quarles, writing this: “In his first 21 months on the job, Randal K. Quarles, the Federal Reserve’s vice chairman for supervision and regulation, met at least 22 times with partners at his former law firm, Davis Polk & Wardwell, which represents many of the nation’s largest banks.” Later in the article, Smialek adds this: “He has talked with Davis Polk more often than other law firms, but executives from Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan have also met with him about 20 times each.” By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Is the Fed’s $3 Trillion in Loans to Trading Houses on Wall Street Legal? The House Financial Services Committee has released its memorandum outlining the topics that will be raised in its hearing tomorrow with Federal bank regulators, which will include Randal Quarles, Vice Chairman of Supervision at the Federal Reserve. Noticeably absent from the list of topics is what legislative authority the Federal Reserve has that gives it the legal power to be pumping out hundreds of billions of dollars each week in revolving loans to the tradinghouses of Wall Street. Since September 17, the Federal Reserve has allowed its New York Fed branch to funnel approximately $3 trillion to unnamed trading houses on Wall Street, much of it at interest rates of less than 2 percent while the behemoth banks that own those trading houses charge their mom and pop credit card customers 17 percent on their credit cards. This looks like more of what Senator Bernie Sanders calls “socialism for the rich, and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.” By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Britain: Lib Dems in panic as centre-ground collapses If a week is a long time in politics, then a couple of months is an eternity, as the Liberal Democrats have discovered in this general election campaign. Having gained eight MPs from a wave of defections of Blairite and ‘moderate’ Tories, and polling ahead of Labour at the beginning of October, the party’s leadership was confidently predicting it would win as many as 100 seats. Buoyed by this apparent surge in support, Jo Swinson even announced that she was in fact aiming to be the next prime minister. But pride often comes before a fall. By Josh Holroyd
Bolivia’s Five Hundred-Year Rebellion Bolivia’s Five Hundred-Year Rebellion In 1781, the Bolivian indigenous leader Tupac Katari led a rebellion in which La Paz, the Spanish colonial capital of “Upper Peru,” was besieged for 109 days.The siege ended with the arrival of a Spanish army. Katari was captured, he and his wife, Bartolina Sisa, were gruesomely executed, and thousands of indigenous people were massacred. For many years this was treated as a minor event in history books, but in the latter half of the twentieth century Katari and Sisa have been celebrated as symbols of the resistance to oppression by the indigenous majority, and as martyrs in a national revolution whose time has finally come. The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia, by Benjamin Dangl (AK Press, 2019), is the story of decades of work by organizers, activists, intellectuals, and politicians to turn this story of indigenous resistance to oppression into the symbol of national liberation. It follows the way social movements have related to the question of indigenous identity, and their efforts to organize and focus its power, up to the point of electing an indigenous president. It is a story of decolonization, of people freeing themselves from the mental and political structures that were imposed upon them by imperial powers. By Peter Lackowski
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
Quotes of the Day: