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Due to Years of Austerity, Cuts to Public Health Care, And An Anti-Science and Profiteering President, The United States Now Leads the World In Coronavirus Cases and Deaths in the World!
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, that the 99% Will Rule, Not the Few!
Images of the Day:
By firmly placing climate change in the context of the Anthropocene, studies such as these challenge the view that global warming can be solved by minor changes and market reforms. Incremental measures such as carbon pricing cannot possibly address the systemic problems that are relentlessly driving global temperatures upward and pushing the Earth into a new and unprecedented state in which the future of civilization itself is in peril. In Facing the Anthropocene, I have tried to show how changes in capitalism during and after World War II caused the global changes that scientists have named the Great Acceleration. As a result, what Marx called “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism” has become an interrelated network of global rifts. The greatest challenge facing our generation is to heal those immense breaks in Earth’s life support systems before it is too late. — Facing the Anthropocene: An Update
Videos of the Day:
United States:
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 Reublicrats 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. Rax the Rich! — They Can Afford To Pay!
United States: Trump Continues To Undermine Electoral System and Create Chaos Two weeks after the November 3 presidential election, Donald Trump continues to tell the country and world, “I won the election”. He insists it was not even close: “I won by millions of votes.” His cohorts, from his cabinet on down the line, declare support for their “leader”. They say the system is rigged and the Democrats “stole” the election. Protests by Trump backers have even occurred in states such as California, where Trump lost by more than five million votes.Trump’s aim is to undermine the constitutional system. He controls the state apparatus, including the armed forces. So far, all his chaotic actions have failed to stop the transition to a new Joe Biden Democratic presidency in two months. By Malik Miah 
Thanksgiving in America: Massive Food Lines and Evictions as Benefits Expire As this week’s Thanksgiving holiday approaches, a social catastrophe is unfolding across America on a scale not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. As of Sunday, there were more than 12.2 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the US and nearly 257,000 deaths. The past week has seen an average of more than 170,000 cases per day, an increase of 59 percent from the average two weeks earlier. Hospitals are being overrun by the surge of cases. Thousands of nurses at hospitals across the country are coming down with the virus, leaving hospitals short-staffed and placing patient care in extreme danger. In El Paso, Texas, a unit of 36 National Guard troops has been mobilized to work through a backlog of close to 240 bodies, victims of COVID-19, at the county morgue. The bodies will be loaded onto refrigerated trucks.The Marshall Project, a nonprofit journalism website, reports that as of November 17 at least 197,659 inmates in state and local prisons had contracted the virus and 1,454 had died, a likely undercount due to poor reporting. By Kate Randall
‘Shameful and Concerning He Is Even Being Considered,’ Says AOC as Rahm Emanuel Floated for Role in Biden Cabinet “The thing about covering up the murder of Laquan McDonald is that it disqualifies you from holding any type of public office. Forever,” said Rep.-elect Cori Bush. Progressives are vocally making clear that any cabinet post for Rahm Emanuel—no matter how low-profile or obscure the position—is unacceptable amid reports that President-elect Joe Biden is considering a spot in his administration for the left-punching former mayor of Chicago, who is notorious for his role in covering up the 2014 police murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. By Jake Johnson
The Teachings of America One teaching taught us that to be anti-war is to be a hateful person, betrayer of your country, deranged. But that’s a strange teaching. There’s teachings that say all soldiers are automatically heroes, and as a result, war is holy. But they didn’t really make sense. There’s been indirect teachings for centuries that equality is fools’ games. Taught those in America too. These teachings taught dysfunction, ruin, and death-dressed-up like the best possible choice. Of all the ways to live in the world, these teachings taught us to live as though afraid of death, afraid of each other, afraid of stable and sacred and growth-based equality. By Chelli Stanley
Environment
“Time to Cut Dirty Energy’s Lifeline”: Report Details How Fossil Fuel Industry Feasted on Covid-19 Relief Programs “By artificially delaying the industry’s inevitable decline at taxpayers’ expense, the government has made it that much harder to make the necessary transition to clean energy sources.” By Brett Wilkins
Facing the Anthropocene: An Update I wrote this book to help bridge the gap between Earth System science and ecosocialism — to show socialists why they must understand the Anthropocene, and to show Earth System scientists why they must understand ecological Marxism. I am honored that Unrast Verlag is making it available in German, and I hope it will expand dialogue at the intersections of science and socialism. When Facing the Anthropocene was published in 2016, it reflected, to the best of my ability, the state of scientific knowledge and debate at the time. But the world does not stand still, so it may be helpful to outline some important recent developments in Anthropocene science in the two main fields involved: geology, which has mainly been concerned with formally defining the new epoch; and Earth System science, which studies the global biological, chemical and physical changes that are reshaping the conditions of life on this plane By Ian Angus
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Licensed to Kill The name’s Capitalism. Racial Capitalism. Like a totalized 21st century social system, like a smoother corporate bureaucratic James Bond. Racial capitalism: naming systemic inequalities exposed by post-George Floyd BLM resistance, and revealed by the Covid pandemic’s disparate racial impacts. Racial capitalism now is settler-colonialist neoliberalism, with the genocide accelerated more up front and center in your face, toxic combo-Rush Limbaugh and Jabba the Hutt.Racial capitalism is bankrupting Detroit. Racial capitalism is the slavery and land grabbing foundations of US political economy. Racial capitalism is bipartisan. Racial capitalism is slave patrol-modeled authorities licensed to kill in Flint, Kenosha, Ferguson, Louisville, all oppressed communities north as well as the old south, via police and viral and human rights violations, dispossessions, structural and deadly violence. Racial capitalism is constitutive of “America”. By Thomas Stephens
Black Agenda Report Presents The Left Len: “Barack Obama’s Legacy of Lies” This episode will be Livestreamed on December 1st at 7:00 PM eastern time. Left Lens Co-Hosts Margaret Kimberley and Danny Haiphong join you live to discuss the Obama legacy and its continued impact on the struggle for peace, justice, and liberation.
Reject “Thanks-Taking,” Join in National Day of Mourning
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
“Instead of celebrating genocide, the National Day of Mourning was created to destroy the Pilgrim mythology” that led to “not a nation of immigrants, but of colonizers,” said Nick Estes, a Lower Brule Sioux and co-founder of The Red Nation. The Day of Mourning “celebrates indigenous resistance” to the European invasion, said Estes, a professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.
Community Control of Police = Autonomous Zone of People Power
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
Pan-African Community Action organizer Netfa Freeman told a panel organized by Black psychology students at Bowie State University, in Maryland: “Community control of police is a way to create autonomous zones of power, so that people can actually take control of public safety.” Dhoruba Bin Wahad, who spent 19 years as a Black Panther Party political prisoner, urged creation of a national front of organizations demanding community control of police. “Unless we abolish policing as it’s presently constituted, we are not going to get anywhere,” said Bin Wahad.
Colin Kaepernick: “Free Mumia”
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
Abu Jamal “has had to endure this second-by-second assault on his soul for 38 years,” said banned football quarterback Colin Kaepernick. If Black lives truly matter, “then Mumia’s life and legacy matter. Free Mumia!”
GOP Tried to Re-Imprison Jalil Muntaqim
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
After 49 years as a Black Panther Party political prisoner, Jalil Muntaqim was released on parole, only to be rearrested for attempting to register to vote in his hometown of Rochester, New York. Muntaqim “was literally arrested in front of his mom” and later released on his own recognizance, said his cousin, Blake Simons. “This is a GOP-orchestrated attack. Jalil is caught in the crosshairs of the propaganda war the far-right is waging.”
Labor:
Economy:
The Wall Street Journal Nominates Janet Yellen as Treasury Secretary Late yesterday afternoon, while the stock market was still open, three reporters at the Wall Street Journal penned an article with this opening statement: “President-elect Joe Biden plans to nominate former Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen, an economist at the forefront of policy-making for three decades, to become the next Treasury secretary, according to people familiar with the decision.” Within the next half hour, every major newswire and many of the largest newspapers in the U.S. were repeating the Journal’s story. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
“Ouch,” the Unkindest Cuts of All During the years of my Jerusalem childhood I was raised in the Antiochian Orthodox tradition. My brothers and I served as altar boys in the St. Simeon’s Qatamoun Orthodox Church, a church we attended until the harassment, harangue, and stone throwing by interloping male Jewish children and adults became life-threatening. Eventually we’d attend St. Andrews Church of Scotland as well as services at the YMCA, a prominent Jerusalem landmark. Most of the itinerant preachers at the YMCA were visiting tourists, mostly from the United States. The latter had to have been charismatic end-of-times preachers touched by Jerusalem’s beautiful landscape, a landscape that has since been blighted by Israel’s destruction of Palestine’s rich and variegated architectural heritage. The rolling hills of Jerusalem and Palestine are now dotted with obtuse 21st century high rise structures, phallic edifices that have usurped and disfigured the quaint and serene Palestinian landscape in the same manner that Palestinian lives have been uprooted and brutalized by a so-called Holocaust surviving tribe. By Raouf Halaby
Venezuela: the APR protests against censorship at VTV On the morning of Thursday, 19 November, organisations that make up the People’s Revolutionary Alternative (APR) protested in repudiation of the media censorship of this left-wing coalition, carried out by public and private. With the waving of flags of the different organisations of the APR, along with chants and speeches by the candidates, the protest took place under the slogan: “Against the media siege of the APR.” The protesters expressed that with the invisibility to which the electoral proposal represented by the APR is subjected, articles 57 and 58 of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela are violated, which enshrine freedom of expression, the right to timely and truthful information, and prohibit censorship. Also, the protesters alleged that with the media siege of the APR, the public and private media violate articles 72 and 81 of the Organic Law on Electoral Processes, of which the National Electoral Council (CNE) must ensure compliance. By Prensa Lucha de Clases (Venezuela)
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 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 to be, a democracy and part of the democratic way. — Roland Sheppard, Let the People Vote on Healthcare
Why has capitalism failed?failed? Apologists for capitalism argue that it is the best, most-efficient system that could ever possibly exist. But the current period of crisis and chaos prove otherwise. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an economic collapse that threatens to throw society back to the 1930s, sending the world into a full-blown depression. Clearly, something is rotten at the heart of the system. The advocates of Keynesian ideas – or modern varieties like Modern Monetary Theory – cannot provide a real solution to this crisis. In his talk from this year’s International Marxist University, Adam Booth, a leading activist of Socialist Appeal, explains why capitalism has failed, and what the way forward is for humanity. By Adam Booth
Biden’s COVID Plan Is Better Than Trump’s, But Still Far From SufficientThe pandemic is a structural problem. To truly fight it, we must take on capitalism, agribusiness and racial inequity. The pandemic is a structural problem. To truly fight it, we must take on capitalism, agribusiness and racial inequity The pandemic is a structural problem. To truly fight it, we must take on capitalism, agribusiness and racial inequity. By Rob Wallace 
How Many Lives Would Have Been Saved, If We Had Cooperated on a Vaccine With China? We know that Republican office holders are not allowed to say that Joe Biden won the election. Apparently there is a similar ban in place for news outlets when it comes to the question of the United States collaborating with China, and other countries, in developing vaccines against the pandemic. In recent days, there have been articles in several major news outlets about how China vaccinated close to 1 million people, under an Emergency Use Authorization, for vaccines that are currently in Phase 3 clinical testing (here, here, here, and here). While large-scale distribution of vaccines, that have not completed testing for safety and effectiveness, is probably not a good public health practice, none of these pieces raised any questions about whether the United States, and other countries, might have benefited from access to the Chinese vaccines. By Dean Baker
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 the 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! For Decades, Blacks Have Been Subjected to The Iron Heel! Currently, the US Capitalist Class is Divided Over When — Not If, to Apply It to Everyone!
Quotes 0f the Day: