During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three-Point Political Program: 1, Austerity,2 Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and 3. The Iron Heel
Always Remember: That Obama That President Obama, With a Majority Democrat Legislature Supported the Wall Street Bailout and Remember, That he Established, in writing, the United States Capitalist Austerity Program, The Race to the Bottom/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 , thet the 99% Will Rule, Not the Few!
The environmental movement has raised many of these demands. In the past 30 years, many laws have been written incorporating some of these concepts. Yet despite these laws, environmental destruction has been allowed to proceed because these regulations have always been compromised by the incorporation of the concept of economic feasibility. ‘Economic feasibility’ means that the profitability of an economic enterprise cannot be subordinated to environmental needs. Therefore, environmental and safety laws, under capitalism, have always been a compromise between science and business. In fact, environmental destruction, pestilence, and death are factored into production the same as casualties of war are factored into military battles. The most glaring example is the occupational environment, where workplaces have become “killing fields”. (See my essay The War at the Point of Production: The ‘Killing Fields’ of the United States.) —Whither Humanity? The Environmental Crisis of Capitalism
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.
Our Country, the United States, is a Rogue Nation and Our Leaders are Criminals For as long as I’ve been alive, my country has been a rogue state.Actually, the US became a rogue state four years before my birth in 1949 when, in 1945, Washington decided to bomb two militarily insignificant cities in Japan with its new super weapon, the atomic bomb, instantly incinerating several hundred thousand Japanese civilians, including many, many children, and condemning at least that many more to slow agonizing deaths from resulting cancers and birth defects. By Dave Lindorff
The Useless War Powers Act Practically speaking, the Trump administration’s extrajudicial assassination of a top Iranian general was probably legal. The rationale is straightforward: Congress has steadily settled on a constitutionally dubious theory of handing the president near-limitless authority over how, when, and why the country goes to war. The 1973 war powers resolution, the often-cited check on this extraordinary authority, is central to the mess. By Harry Blain
Trump Administration Refuses to Release All Available Aid to Puerto Rico Despite Earthquakes, Citing ‘Corruption’ Concerns The Trump administration is refusing to release all available disaster aid to Puerto Rico despite this week’s earthquakes, citing concerns about “corruption” and “financial mismanagement” on the island, the Daily News has learned. President Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development was supposed to start disbursing $9.7 billion in aid to Puerto Rico in September as part of a congressional allocation to beef up natural disaster readiness following the devastating hurricanes that battered the island in 2017 and killed nearly 3,000 people. By Chris Sommerfeldt
The Danger In Threats The high tensions caused by Washington between the US and Iran are to blame for the Ukrainian airliner that was shot down. “Human error at a time of crisis caused by US adventurism led to disaster.” https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/stunning-reversal-iran-admits-accidentally-shooting-down-ukrainian-passenger-jet#comment_stream Just as the Iranian commander misinterpreted the airliner’s maneuver as a strike on a military base, an American or a Russian can conclude that a false warning of incoming ICBMs, of which the Cold War had many, is real. During the Cold War as each side was working to reduce tensions, there was no hair-trigger in place. Now that the US has caused high tensions with Russia as it has with Iran, false alarms are extremely dangerous. This is the message that Stephen Cohen, myself, and others have continually given. Hopefully, some good will come from the loss of 176 lives by sobering up the warharks in Washington who are forever issuing threats. The responsibility for raising tensions to such dangerous levels in both Iran and Russia is entirely Washington’s. This reckless and irresponsible behavior must stop before the unnecessary tensions cause Armageddon. By Paul Craig Roberts
Environment
‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ is a hoax Allen White’s thinking about how to make corporations truly sustainable in all dimensions is always stimulating. His new paper on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate redesign provides a fitting opportunity for me to revisit a chapter in my work that I abandoned several years ago out of frustration. I became involved in social activism to find ways to gradually reduce and eventually end what is called “unequal exchange.” Workers in countries on the periphery of global markets are exploited at will by transnational corporations in a “modern slave work” system in which they are paid a fraction of what such corporations would pay to workers in their home countries for equal work of equal value. When I began my effort at the start of the century, I found CSR a potentially viable concept pressuring corporations to provide living wages and gradually achieve equal pay for work of equal value.However, as I met with many NGOs, trade unions, multilateral organizations, and business initiatives and watched CSR evolve, it gradually became evident that CSR was really a hoax, for the simple reason that the vast majority of corporations had a single-minded focus on the short-term maximization of shareholder value, and this priority was baked into their DNA. They thus approached CSR as a way to burnish their public image, only pretending to change so that everything would remain the same. CSR, as a result, became a mockery of what it should have been. Surely, there have been many well-intentioned initiatives, but our vision was naïve from the start, given the nature of capitalism. In practice, CSR became a public relations tool to maximize profits. By Álvaro de Regil Castilla
The ‘War’on Cancer: Trump’s Gutting of Toxics Regulations Will Mean Higher Profits for Polluters and Higher Cancer Rates for the American People Two years earlier, the Environmental Protection Agency released an assessment of ethylene oxide performed by a small division of the agency known as IRIS, which crunched numbers showing that exposure to ethylene oxide caused elevated rates of tumors in the brain, lungs, uterus, and lymph systems. The technical reportfrom IRIS, which stands for the Integrated Risk Information System, changed the classification of ethylene oxide, an odorless gas used to make other chemicals and sterilize medical equipment, from probably carcinogenic to plainly carcinogenic to humans. Based in part on several studies showing that female workers exposed to ethylene oxide had higher breast cancer rates, the report calculated a safety threshold that was 30 times more sensitive than previous estimates. Combined with agency data about local emissions, the new threshold allowed the EPA Office of Air and Radiation to identify the census tracts where residents were at increased risk of cancer from breathing ethylene oxide. By Sharon Lerner
Black Liberation/ Civil Rights:
Labor:
Economy:
Are the Fed’s Repo Loans Being Repaid by Wall Street’s Trading Houses or Just Rolled Over and Over? Last Friday, the usually reliable and fact-intensive financial website, Wolf Street, threw a hissy fit over how the Wall Street Journal (and by extension, Wall Street On Parade) is reporting the tallies for the repo loans that the New York Fed has been pumping out every business day since September 17, 2019 to the trading houses on Wall Street.By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Traders at the New York Fed Have Speed Dials to Wall Street’s Biggest Firms (Photo Source: Federal Reserve Educational Video)
World:
Extinction Rebellion: Priti Patel Defends Inclusion of Extinction Rebellion on UK Terror List Home secretary accepts XR is not terror group but says assessment has to be based on ‘security risks’ The home secretary, Priti Patel, has defended anti-terror police for putting the Extinction Rebellion environmental protest group on a list of extremist ideologies, saying it was important to look at “a range of security risks”. While accepting that XR was not a terrorist organisation, Patel told LBC radio that such assessment had to be “based in terms of risk to the public, security risks, security threats”. XR has threatened legal action after the Guardian revealed it had been placed on a list of ideologies that should be reported to the authorities running the Prevent anti-radicalisation programme. Police now say that was an error. By Peter Walker
Understanding France’s General Strike in the Context of the Yellow Vests and Global Class Warfare Labor and capital are at loggerheads in France. As the open-ended strike launched on December 5th against a neoliberal overhaul of the pension system continues to expand, the Macron regime has dug in its heels to defend the advantages this so-called reform would have for the wealthy (even though it has recently been forced to presentwhat it considers to be a “compromise” to the union leadership). In order to fully understand the nature and importance of this battle, it needs to be situated in relation to the recent history of the Yellow Vests movement as well as the global context of contemporary class warfare. By Gabriel RockhillEmbracing Palestine: How to Combat Israel’s Misuse of “Antisemitism” At a talk I delivered in Northern England in March 2018, I proposed that the best response to falsified accusations of antisemitism, which are often lobbed against pro-Palestinian communities and intellectuals everywhere, is to draw even closer to the Palestinian narrative. In fact, my proposal was not meant to be a sentimental response in any way. “Reclaiming the Palestinian narrative” has been the main theme in most of my public speeches and writings in recent years. All of my books and much of my academic studies and research have largely focused on ositioning the Palestinian people – their rights, history, culture, and political aspirations – at the very core of any genuine understanding of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli colonialism and apartheid. By Ramzy BaroudEducation, 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 ‘governn’, 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:
Are the Fed’s Repo Loans Being Repaid by Wall Street’s Trading Houses or Just Rolled Over and Over? Last Friday, the usually reliable and fact-intensive financial website, Wolf Street, threw a hissy fit over how the Wall Street Journal (and by extension, Wall Street On Parade) is reporting the tallies for the repo loans that the New York Fed has been pumping out every business day since September 17, 2019 to the trading houses on Wall Street.By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Education, Health, Science, and Welfare: