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Laura Gray’s cartoon from the page of The Militant August 18, 1945, under banner headline: “There Is No Peace”
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 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!
Image/Quote 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.
Mnuchin Admits Trump’s Budget Cuts Social Security Even as President Claims He Is ‘Not Touching’ the Program “When Steve Mnuchin or any other politician says that a ‘reduction in the rate of increase’ is different than a benefit cut, they are shamelessly lying.” During a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin—using euphemistic language Democratic lawmakers described as “Washington-speak“—admitted that President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2021 budget proposal would cut Social Security days after the president insisted he is “not touching” the program. Pressed by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) on the budget’s call for tens of billions in cuts to Social Security over the next decade, Mnuchin said, “I believe it’s not a cut, it’s a reduction in the rate of increase. And it’s not to the benefits of people on Social Security.” “Any ‘reduction in the rate of increase’ would lead to benefit cuts.” —Alex Lawson, Social Security Works By Jake Johnson
Environment:
Seven Years Ago: The Earth’s Tipping Point: 350 Parts Per Million C02 Now we are now 66.08 parts per million over the ‘tipping point’ : ‘The Saddest Thing Is That This Won’t Be Breaking News’: Concentration of CO2 Hits Record High of 416 ppm “Emissions from fossil fuels and deforestation need to be reduced to ZERO to stop this trend!” The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit a record high Monday, a reading from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that elicited fresh calls from climate activists and scientists for the international community to end planet-heating emissions from fossil fuels and deforestation. According to NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory, an atmospheric baseline station in Hawaii, the daily average of CO2 levels on Feb. 10 was 416.08 parts per million. In recent years, soaring rates of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have signaled that the world is not ambitiously addressing the climate crisis. By Jessica Corbett
Coded Messages About Australia’s Big Burn “Blame doesn’t help anybody at this time, and over-analysis of these things is not a productive exercise” – Australian prime minister Scott Morrison Media-inflected “fatigue” has been in the news recently. By Kenneth Surin
Timber Industry Wants to Rape-and-Run on Our National Forests When Idaho billionaire Ron Yanke purchased the timber mills in Townsend and Livingston, Montana years ago to form RY Timber, he also bought lots of former Anaconda Mining Company timberland. But just like Champion International and Plum Creek Timber who, according to a University of Montana study, cut trees 3 times faster than they could grow back, RY has already overcut their private land. By Mike Garrity
When Moon unmasks your naked face And gilds your gun with diamonds green
I mark your progress from afar. You stumble toward my roosting place,
Studying your tiny screen,Tracking an artificial star.
You killed my wife some dawns ago,Fooled by your telescopic sight:
She was a Northern Spotted Owl! You threw her feathers in the snow
No measurements of weight or height: Bars or spots, murder most foul!
Management stalks through the trees Plying the Endangered Species Act
And shifting its dynamic core. We will be gone when, by degrees
The soil will sicken, parched and cracked: Then fire, desert, nothing more.
I, Owl, now curse your species’ birth:
No Permit comes from Mother Earth.
Nearly two million gallons of Corexit were dumped onto spilled oil in the Gulf or injected into the leaking wellhead after the spill. Dispersants act similarly to dish soap – but are not as benign, despite BP’s frequent comparisons. Dispersants like Corexit contain chemicals that are harmful to human health and to sea life; the small droplets not only disperse more widely than the oil itself while being harder to see, but are also more easily ingested by organisms up and down the food chain, threatening entire ecosystems in the Gulf. BP and the government made a tradeoff using Corexit. They believed it was more dangerous to allow oil to reach the shoreline and vulnerable estuaries than to use dispersants in the Gulf, to break up the oil to accelerate biodegradation. But the risks of using dispersants in such quantities and at such depths have never been fully analyzed. The harm to life on the sea floor, in the water column, and along the shoreline should be enough to halt future use under such conditions until the long-term impacts of the use of dispersants in the Deepwater Horizon aftermath can be adequately assessed. Harm to sea life and the environment are just some of the many downsides to the unprecedented use of dispersants following the BP disaster. In Nalco’s application to the EPA for Corexit, they recommended using protective gear when applying the dispersant to avoid skin or eye contact, and seeking medical attention in case such an accident occurs. GAP has previously documented the harmful health effects of contact with Corexit to Gulf responders who cleaned the spill. Some of these impacts are severe, rendering victims incapable of carrying on their normal lives. Seven years later, Corexit is still the go-to dispersant for major oil companies in case of another major offshore oil spill. GAP staff met with BP shortly after the 2010 blowout in the Gulf: they made it clear that unless the government changes the rules, they plan to use Corexit for any future spill. In 2015, the EPA announced it would revise its rules governing the use of chemical dispersants like Corexit after oil spills, based on lessons learned after the Deepwater Horizon spill. The new rules would require dispersant manufacturers to provide more information on the toxicity and efficacy of dispersants along with their potential impacts on human health, which we support. But the new rules were never finalized under the Obama administration. Under the new administration, which has uniformly expressed disdain for environmental protection generally and the EPA in particular, it is difficult to imagine positive action on this rule-making before the next oil spill disaster. And given the new policy directives to accelerate domestic oil extraction, future spills are inevitable. We all now know that when the next catastrophic oil spill occurs offshore, it will be far worse than originally reported, and Corexit will only exacerbate the problem. There have already been over forty whistleblowers who alerted the public to the dangers of this chemical. The question is, will we heed their warnings in the future, or be doomed to repeat this costly mistake from our past? — The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Catastrophe: After 7 Years, We’re Still Stuck with Toxic Corexit
This study does not even take into account the damage caused by the use of Corexit, which sent the Deepwater Horizon Spilled oil out of sight but, not out of danger to life in lower levels of the Gulf of Mexico!:
New Study Shows Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Larger Than Previously Thought Toxic and invisible oil spread well beyond known satellite footprint, fishing closures Toxic and invisible oil spread well beyond the known satellite footprint of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, according to a new study led by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel school of Marine and Atmospheric Science. These new findings have important implications for environmental health during future oil spills.The UM Rosenstiel School-led research team combine oil-transport modeling techniques with remote sensing data and in-water sampling to provide a comprehensive look at the oil spill. The findings revealed that a fraction of the spill was invisible to satellites, and yet toxic to marine wildlife.”We found that there was a substantial fraction of oil invisible to satellites and aerial imaging,” said the study’s lead author Igal Berenshtein, a postdoctoral researcher at the UM Rosenstiel School. “The spill was only visible to satellites above a certain oil concentration at the surface leaving a portion unaccounted for.”
Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:
Labor:
$93.6 Million Verdict Threatens to Bankrupt One of America’s Most Powerful Unions What started as a dispute over two jobs in Portland, Ore., escalated to a jury verdict that could devastate the storied International Longshore and Warehouse Union. For decades, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union has solidified its power with aggressive demonstrations of solidarity across its Pacific ports. That includes a series of actions beginning in 2012, when dockworkers in Portland, Ore., introduced a slowdown, at least in part to protest two positions they believed should be going to the union’s members. The company operating the port went to court, contending that the job actions that continued for years were illegal and financially destructive. Seven years later, a federal jury has agreed, awarding the company a stunning $93.6 million judgment. By By Mike Baker
The Survival of the ILWU at Stake! Coastwide Port Action Can Stop Union Busting! Labor Solidarity Must Prevail A recent federal court decision in Portland, Oregon poses an immediate existential threat to the strongest union in the U.S. today, the ILWU, and ultimately to the labor movement as a whole. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), arguably one of the most militant unions in the U.S., has been hit with a union-busting $93.6 million dollar court-imposed fine for a secondary boycott deemed illegal under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. The plaintiff, International Container Terminal Services, Inc. (ICTSI) is owned by the third richest man in the Philippines, billionaire Enrique Razon Jr. and operates in 27 ports worldwide, mainly in poor, developing countries.The maritime company claims it was run out of business in Portland because of a secondary boycott by the longshore union during a long-running dispute over two mechanics jobs which are presently done by another union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). ICTSI argues the primary employer is the Port of Portland which hires the mechanics, so they claim the longshore union organized an “illegal” secondary boycott. For the ILWU’s part, it was a foolish top down campaign organized by the dubious Leal Sundet, then, an ILWU Coast Committeeman who had previously been an Oregon area executive for the employers group, the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA). By Jack Heyman
Economy:
Fed Chair Tells Congress There Is a 10-Year “Game Plan” to Deal with Financial Crisis But No Plan to Deal with Americans Left Devastated By It During his testimony to the Senate Banking Committee yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell let it slip out, for the first time, that the Federal Reserve has had a 10-year game plan to deal with the financial crisis. In response to a question on cyber threats from Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Powell stated the following: “They kind of pay us to be awake at night worrying about things. I would say that if you look at what happened in the financial crisis, we had a game plan there. We implemented it over the course of 10 years. I won’t say that it’s perfect or anything like that, but we have a plan that is meant to address those kinds of things.” By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
The Deal of the Century Begins: Israeli Warplanes Launch a Series of Air Raids on Southern Gaza A series of Israeli air raids on Rafah in southern Gaza Strip at dawn Friday caused material damage and a blackout. The PIC reporter said that the warplanes fired a missile at a resistance monitoring site on Rafah beach then fired 14 other missiles at an empty land lot that has been allocated for building a central hospital to the west of the city. Israeli warplanes had bombed agricultural land in eastern Rafah on Thursday night with no casualties reported. The Israeli occupation army claimed the raids were in retaliation to the firing of a rocket from Gaza that fell in an open area in Sderot.
The Internet Is Widely Accessible in Cuba. Why Is the US Insisting It Isn’t? rinidad, Cuba — Sitting at an outdoor café, Alian Rojas deftly thumbs the small keyboard on his iPhone as he calls up The New York Times website. Then he shows a reporter how easily he can use WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube. “I can access any website I want,” says the 30-something tour guide. Cubans can even download the Miami Herald‘s Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald, infamous as a font of anti-Cuban government reporting. They can use Signal, an encrypted messaging app developed by Edward Snowden and others, which prevents even the U.S. government from eavesdropping. By Reese Erlich
Health, Science, Education, 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!
Stop Worrying
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