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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:
From: My Forefathers and The 1%’s Forefathers As Noam Chomsky stated in his interview on American History and Democracy: . . . If you go back to the record of the Constitutional Convention, which took place in 1787, almost immediately after the end of the war, you see that they are already moving in another direction. James Madison — who was the main framer, and one of the Founding Fathers who was most libertarian — makes it very clear that the new constitutional system must be designed so as to ensure that the government will, in his words, “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” and bar the way to anything like agrarian reform. The determination was made that America could not allow functioning democracy, since people would use their political power to attack the wealth of the minority of the opulent. Therefore, Madison argues, the country should be placed in the hands of the wealthier set of men, as he put it. . .To this day, we have a government and state apparatus that is designed to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” — there is no Democracy! It has been endemic to this society to expand westward which included the genocide of the Native Americans.
From:“The Drug Trade”. In the 2001 article: War on Drugs Dirty Money Foundation of US Growth and Empire Size and Scope of Money Laundering by US Banks by James Petras, Professor of Sociology, Binghamton University, he explains that 500 Billion to a Trillion dollars gets added to world capitalist economy through “illegal means.” he concludes the article with the following:The increasing polarization of the world is embedded in this organized system of criminal and corrupt financial transactions. While speculation and foreign debt payments play a role in undermining living standards in the crisis regions, the multi-trillion dollar money laundering and bank servicing of corrupt officials is a much more significant factor, sustaining Western prosperity, U.S. empire building and financial stability. The scale, scope and time frame of transfers and money laundering, the centrality of the biggest banking enterprises and the complicity of the governments, strongly suggests that the dynamics of growth and stagnation, empire and re-colonization are intimately related to a new form of capitalism built around pillage, criminality, corruption and complicity. ‘This Goes Straight to the Top.
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.
PBS Public Editor and the Disease of Contempt You are the public editor at the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Your job – take in complaints and criticism from the public and respond. One recurring complaint from the public – PBS is heavily funded by corporate America – and as a result, PBS shies away from those who are critical of corporate control in the USA.A previous public editor, Michael Getler, addressed this issue head on, in a number of columns throughout his twelve year career (2005 to 2017) as the ombudsman at PBS. In one, titled Keeping Their Heads Down, (June 18, 2010), Getler ran a complaint from a viewer in Oregon. “I continue to be uncomfortable with your cozy association with oil giants (BP, Chevron) and other notorious corporations like Monsanto who apparently shovel a lot of money your way,” the viewer wrote. “This practice undermines trust of your truth telling capacity when it might affect one of your corporate supporters. How is this practice any different than the other national corporate media entities who also accept money for the same reason you do? We have no trust of the integrity of these corporate media sources and we are losing trust in your operation for the same reason.” By Russell Mokhiber
U.S. Government and Top Mexican Drug Cartel Exposed as Partners For over a decade, under multiple administrations, the U.S. government had a secret agreement with the ruthless Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed it to operate with impunity, an in-depth investigation by a leading Mexican newspaper confirmed this week. In exchange for information and assistance in quashing competing criminal syndicates, the Bush and Obama administrations let the Sinaloa cartel import tons of drugs into the United States while wiping out Sinaloa competitors and ensuring that its leaders would not be prosecuted for their long list of major crimes. Other revelations also point strongly to massive but clandestine U.S. government involvement in drug trafficking. By Alex Newman
A Cesspool of Constitutional Nonsense-Impeachment in the Senate The process moves to the Senate. Will the mockery continue after the procedurals and pomp are put to rest and the hearing begins? Or will there be a genuine attempt to find some truth no matter how shallow? Since the House of Representatives closed up its hearings in December 2019, the most interesting event to happen in this story of Trump’s impeachment was the interview with the fellow Parnas in which he stated that Trump knew him and knew what he and Giuliani were up to. What they were up to was getting dirt on Joe Biden for Trump. Even the government’s Budget Office says that is illegal. By Ron Jacobs
Diminishing Returns: Calculated Misery in Air Travel If there comes a point when people will decide not to fly, the issue may well be less to do with any moral or ethical issue with climate change than the fact that commercial flights have become atrocious. They are naked money-making concerns with diminishing returns on quality. The key factor that plays out here is what economists like to term inelastic demand. Prices can be raised; service quality can be reduced, but customers will keep coming. The demand remains, even if the supply leaves much to be desired. By Binoy Kampmark
Environment:
Ancient Viruses Trapped in Glaciers for Thousands of Years Could Be Released By Climate Crisis: Study A new study of ice cores in glaciers in the autonomous Chinese region of Tibet reveals that the ice floes are holding viruses previously unencountered by humans, raising the possibility of the microbes being released as the climate crisis continues. “We’ve opened up a Pandora’s box with climate change,” observed one Twitter user. The report, “Glacier ice archives fifteen-thousand-year-old viruses,” was published in the journal bioRxiv in early January by the scientists who examined the cores. It is awaiting peer review. By Eoin Higgins 
Black Liberation/ Civil Rights:
47 Years After “Roe v. Wade,” Theoretical Abortion Rights Are Not Enough As we mark the 47th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that legalized abortion in the United States, we need only look to a recent sneak attack by the Trump administration as a reminder that even with the ruling in place, anti-abortion politicians are hellbent on passing policies that keep the true promise of Roe from being realized for many. As 2019 drew to a close and the holiday season kicked off in full force, the Trump administration quietly finalized a rule that will require private health insurers to send separate bills for abortion coverage, doubling down on its agenda to make abortion unaffordable and unavailable. The timing of the policy rollout, at the end of a decade marked by a landslide of attacks on reproductive health care, was nothing if not deliberate. This administration knows how unpopular restrictions on abortion coverage are and purposefully chose to finalize this regulation thinking no one would notice, hoping to bury it amid the chaos of travel and other end-of-year business. By Destiny Lopez
Labor:
Economy:
Is a Ponzi scheme the right way to look at what is happening to markets as a result of the flood of underpriced loans from the New York Fed – with money it creates electronically out of thin air. The traditional term on Wall Street for what is currently happening is “distribution.” That’s when the smart money pumps up the market sufficiently to excite the dumb money to come in – thus enabling the 1 percent to “distribute” their overpriced stocks to the suckers who don’t understand the history of “distribution” on Wall Street. The problem is this. Wall Street never had unlimited funds to spike the market higher. The New York Fed does. So the question really boils down to (1) will Congress ever find the guts to hold hearings on this unaccountable money spigot at the New York Fed; (2) the Fed’s balance sheet is already over $4 trillion; is it prepared to double or triple that to keep the stock market roaring; (3) will any presidential candidate have the courage to use their bully pulpit to bring this critical topic to the attention of the American people, since mainstream media has refused to do so. — The Man Who Advises the New York Fed Says It and Other Central Banks Are “Fueling a Ponzi Market”
Goldman Sachs: The Vampire Squid’s Alum Control Two Fed Banks, the U.S. Treasury, the European Central Bank and the Bank of EnglandThe head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (Robert S. Kaplan), the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (Neel Kashkari), the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury (Steve Mnuchin), the President of the European Central Bank (Mario Draghi) and the head of the Bank of England (Mark Carney) all have two things in common: they sit atop vast amounts of money and they are all alums of Goldman Sachs. In addition, the immediate past President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William Dudley, which secretly sluiced over $29 trillion to bail out Wall Street banks during the financial crisis and has now opened its money spigot for trillions of dollars more, worked at Goldman Sachs for more than two decades, rising to the rank of partner and U.S. Chief Economist. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
The Man Who Advises the New York Fed Says It and Other Central Banks Are “Fueling a Ponzi Market” On Monday, a member of the New York Fed’s own Investor Advisory Committee on Financial Markets, Scott Minerd, published a critique which he headlined as follows: “Global Central Banks Fueling a Ponzi Market,” with this scary subhead: “Ultimately, investors will awaken to the rising tide of defaults and downgrades.” The thrust of the article is that central banks (which include the New York Fed’s Wall Street money spigot that was launched on September 17, 2019) are creating a Ponzi scheme of liquidity that is hiding the true state of risk in both the stock and bond markets. The implication is that without the Fed’s cheap money flooding markets, interest rates on questionable debt would be much higher, thus providing a red flag for investors. By Pam Martens and Russ Marten
World:
The Catalan Crisis Threatens to Reopen a Debate That the EU’s Power Brokers Thought They Had Long Ago Quashed Though it is largely forgotten today, there was during the late 80s and early 90s a vigorous debate in numerous sectors of European life about whether the EU would be best structured as a Union of Regions or as a Union of States.Adherents of the first posture hoped and believed that the goal the then still-emerging Union should be to greatly lessen the importance of existing national boundaries and governments and to promote, or at least not stand in the way of, the emergence of new economic and social regions. For example, since the Galician region of Spain shares much in the way of language culture and geography with neighboring northern Portugal, it should, according to this outlook, be free to loosen existing bonds with far-away Madrid and direct more of its resources and infrastructural aims toward forging economic and social integration with nearby and traditionally dynamic Oporto. By Thomas S. Harrington
The Mood In Davos: Doom And Gloom As Crisis Looms The out-of-touch elite are meeting in Davos this week for their annual exclusive shindig. But the mood amongst the super-rich and their representatives will be glum and gloomy, with their liberal world order facing threats on all fronts. Topics at this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in the Swiss alps show the anxieties that plague the ruling class. Official themes of the establishment event include issues such as: “fairer economies”; “how to save the planet”; “tech for good”; “the future of work”; and “beyond geopolitics”. Stripping away the euphemism, these translate into plainspeak as: potential social explosions over inequality; the climate crisis; the overbearing dominance of Big Brother tech monopolies; the contradictions of automation under capitalism; and the clash of rival imperialisms and the breakdown of the status quo. By Adam Booth
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!
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