Skip to content
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!
Images of the Day:
The latest figures (2018) show that Washington is still the most tax-regressive state in the country– the poorest fifth of residents pay 17.8%, the top 1% only pay about 3% of their income in taxes. — Politics and Business in Seattle
That scary news followed an equally troubling missive earlier in the year. On June 3 the $4.7 billion Woodford Equity Income Fund in the U.K. froze withdrawals by investors. The fund was slated to open for withdrawals in December but the U.K. regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), announced in October that the fund will not reopen and will be liquidated instead. The FCA has an ongoing investigation into the matter. The problem, according to the FCA, is that the fund was holding illiquid and hard to price assets. On December 4, the U.K. based M&G Property Portfolio announced it would suspend dealings, stating that it could not meet redemptions due to difficulty in selling commercial property. Investors had pulled an estimated $1.2 billion from the fund in the first 10 months of last year. Just yesterday, the Korean hedge fund manager, Lime Asset Management, announced that it was suspending withdrawals from its various hedge funds that would impact $1.7 billion in assets. The hedge fund manager had reported earlier last year that it was halting withdrawals on $700 million of funds. The problem at Lime is also reported to be illiquid assets. Supporting the idea that a spike in hedge fund withdrawals is partly responsible for the Fed restoring its cash feeding tube to Wall Street, the Financial Times reported on October 1 that the CFO of a “top-10 US bank” told it that “We have plenty of liquidity. We are just choosing not to lend it out overnight to hedge funds.” —New York Fed Considering Becoming Sugar Daddy to Hedge Funds as their Distress Grows
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.
Environment:
California’s Delta Tunnel Planning Moves Full Speed Ahead The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) is moving full-speed ahead with its campaign to build the controversial single tunnel under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, as demonstrated in the latest Delta conveyance update from the agency yesterday. Conservationists, Tribal leaders, recreational anglers, commercial fishermen, environmental justice advocates, boaters, Delta business owners and elected leaders oppose the single tunnel because it would drive already imperiled Delta smelt, long fin smelt, winter-run and spring-run Chinook salmon and other species into the abyss of extinction. It would divert massive quantities of water from the Sacramento River in the northern end of the Delta rather than letting the water flow naturally into the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary, depriving the estuary of the water that it needs to function as an ecosystem.“As we begin the new year, below are updates on a few Delta conveyance items currently underway and upcoming,” the agency announced:By Dan Bacher
Link Between Fracking, Delta Tunnels? By now, most Californians probably have heard that a huge geologic formation known as the Monterey Shale contains oil and natural gas in Saudi Arabian-style quantities, locked up in underground rocks lacing an area extending more than 100 miles along the west side of the San Joaquin Valley and beyond.Getting that oil out would require hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, a process involving high-pressure underground injection of water and chemicals. No one has yet said publicly how much water it would take to exploit the oil and gas in quantities large enough to make America energy-independent. No one also knows whether this might damage underground water tables. But there is no doubt that oil drilling companies would need a reliable source of water before they invest heavily in the Monterey Shale, which one USC study claimed could produce as many as 500,000 new California jobs. By Tom Elias
California New Water Tunnel To Provide More Water To The Facking Filelds:
Climate Groups Thank Sanders for Being Only Candidate at Debate to Stand Against Trump-Led Trade Deal “We can do much better than a Trump-led trade deal that does not even have the phrase ‘climate change’ in it.”Climate action advocates thanked Sen. Bernie Sanders for being adamant during Tuesday night’s Democratic debate that climate and trade issues are one and the same, even as debate moderators attempted to separate the subjects.When asked about the USMCA, which he voted against moving out of committee on Tuesday, Sanders said he would not support any trade deal that “does not incorporate very, very strong principles to significantly lower fossil fuel emissions in the world.” By Julia Conley
Black Liberation/ Civil Rights:
At the time of their assassinations, both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were embarking on a course in opposition to thecapitalist system. It is clear from reading and listening to their final speeches that they had both evolved to similar conclusions of capitalism’s role in the maintenance of racism. That is why they were “neutralized”. — Roland Sheppard, The Assassinations of M.L.K. Jr. and Malcolm X
MLK and the Black Misleadership Class Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday is the greatest sheer spectacle of hypocrisy and historical duplicity of the year, as Black misleaders take center stage to claim his mandate and mission on behalf of a corporate party. “While Dr. King rejected an alliance with the ‘triple evils,’ Black Democratic misleaders describe their deal with the Devil as smart, ‘strategic’ politics.” The birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is commemorated each year at thousands of events in literally every U.S. city, yet the martyred human rights leader’s political philosophy is totally absent from the agenda of today’s Black Misleadership Class, a grasping cabal of hustlers and opportunists that have grown fat and infinitely corrupt through their collaboration with “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” Their “freedom train” was the Democratic Party, the half of the corporate electoral duopoly that allowed colored folks to ride as first class passengers – as long as they didn’t question the schedule or the destination. The budding Black misleaders hopped on board the Democratic Party express to the boardrooms of corporate power at about the same time that Dr. King was making his definitive break with the evil “triplets’” infernal machinery, including both corporate parties. By Glen Ford, BAR executive editor
Labor:
Economy:
New York Fed Considering Becoming Sugar Daddy to Hedge Funds as their Distress Grows It’s apparently not enough of a billionaire subsidy for the U.S. Treasury’s Internal Revenue Service to give a monster tax break to hedge fund titans by allowing them to pay Federal taxes on the basis of “carried interest,” meaning that they have a special loophole to pay a lower tax rate than many school teachers, nurses and plumbers. Now, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Reserve is actually considering opening its super-cheap repo loan money spigot to hedge funds. It doesn’t get any crazier than this. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
JPMorgan’s Historic Earnings Confirm that Fed Loans Are Subsidizing Profits on Wall Street The New York Fed is back to subsidizing billions of dollars in profits at Wall Street’s trading houses, just as it did during the financial crisis. Yesterday, JPMorgan Chase reported that its profits for the quarter ending December 31, 2019 hit an all-time record. (The bank has been around for more than a century, so that’s saying something.) The quarterly profits were $8.52 billion – for the same three-month period in which the New York Fed has been flooding unnamed Wall Street trading houses with hundreds of billions of dollars each week in super cheap loans. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
“Megxit” and the crisis of the Monarchy In recent months the monarchy has been thrown into crisis, a symptom of the crisis of capitalism. First we had the proroguing of parliament, then Prince Andrew’s train crash interview and now the crisis of “Megxit.” Overthrow this feudal relic! The year 2019 was certainly one to forget for the royal family. It started off with a “bump” when 97-year-old Phillip crashed into another car, with a mother and her 9-month-old baby inside. Fortunately, it transpired that the laws of the road don’t apply to him. In autumn, Boris went one further. By proroguing parliament he taught us that literally none of the laws apply to Her Royal Highness! The law courts had to wriggle and squirm to overturn Boris’ prorogation without accidentally ruling that the Queen had broken the law. The latter, you see, is quite impossible. By Ben Curry
South Korea Declares State Of Emergency as ‘Unprecedented’ Wildfires Force Thousands toFlee South Korea has declared a state of emergency in five cities on the eastern coast after wildfires ripped through the region, leaving one person dead, 35 injured and forcing at least 4,800 people to evacuate their homes. More than 17,000 firefighters – including military personnel using helicopters – have been deployed to fight the blazes, which the local government in the city of Goseong described as an “unprecedented disaster.” By Julian Ryall
Where is the Reporting on PetroCaribe? January 12 marks ten years since Haiti’s deadly earthquake. Usually, Haiti appears in international news when there’s a scandal, a disaster, violence. There was a flurry of coverage in October when daily protests, begun with a nine-week general strike – in Haitian Creole, peyi lòk – met with government repression, including the death of three journalists. The mobilization has been ongoing since July 2018, leading to a partial report naming high-ranking government officials of mismanagement of PetroCaribe funds published at the end of May 2019 Most articles are without context, many led by images of burning tires that, to foreign capitalist press, represents violence. The first independent Black nation, Haiti has always suffered under white supremacist and racist ideology. Other mobilizations such as Yellow Vests in France can engage the same tactic, but in the minds of imperialist countries’ media and leaders, white activists are “mobilizing” while Black ones “commit violence.” . By Mark Schuller
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 ‘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!
The Wonders of Modern Life Briefly Explained: An Anthropology of the Industrial Revolution In ‘Capital,’ Marx defined two ways of creating a surplus from exploiting the labor of others. The first is the extraction of ‘absolute surplus value.’ Extracting absolute surplus value means profiting from the labor of others by making them work longer or harder or getting more of them to work. This economic model comes up against predictable limits: people die from overwork, you can’t get enough of them, they cost too much to keep healthy, and so on. The second way of creating a profit is to make improvements to the organisation of their tasks, and to introduce machinery to enable labor time to be more productive. This second way is called the extraction of ‘relative surplus value’ – and it is the prime motor of capital-ism. The profits available from this second way of doing things are dependent not upon absolutes like the number of workers or the availability of a resource but upon the entrepreneurs’ ability to innovate production, supply and distribution methods so that profits go up relative to other factors that remain constant or that might even be reduced. New methods or machinery, for example and as we all know, may mean less workers are needed. By Peter Harrison
Analysis of 30 Years of Single-Payer Research Shows Medicare for All Would Absolutely Save US Money “At this point, the most expensive health care plan is the status quo.”— Dr. Adam Gaffney, PHNP “Across the political spectrum, there is near consensus among these economists that a single-payer system would save money.” A comprehensive new study that reviewed nearly three decades of existing analyses shows implementation of a single-payer healthcare system like Medicare for All could dramatically reduce costs in the United States, with savings likely experienced in the first year and definitely over the longer term. By Eoin Higgins
Quotes of the Day:
California Aqueduct System Map