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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:
The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act was duly passed. It contained 29 new minimum mandatory sentences. Up until that time in the history of the Republic there had been only 56 mandatory minimum sentences. The new law had a death penalty provision for drug ‘king pins’ and prohibited parole for even minor possession offenses. But the chief focus of the bill was crack cocaine (mainly used in the inter-cities). Congress established a 100-to-1 sentencing ratio between possession of crack and powder cocaine (mainly used in the suburbs). Under this provision possession of five grams of crack carries a minimum five-year federal prison sentence. The same mandatory minimum is not reached for any amount of powder cocaine under 500 grams. This sentencing disproportion was based on faulty testimony that crack was 50 times as addictive as powdered coke. Congress then doubled this ratio as a so-called ‘violence penalty’.— Race and the Drug War (1999)
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
The ‘Moderate’ Rot at the Top of the Democratic Party Joe Biden’s choices to run the Office of Management and Budget and the State Department personify everything that’s wrong with the party. Sometimes a couple of nominations convey an incoming president’s basic mindset and worldview. That’s how it seems with Joe Biden’s choices to run the Office of Management and Budget and the State Department. For OMB director, Biden selected corporate centrist Neera Tanden, whose Center for American Progress thrives on the largesse of wealthy donors representing powerful corporate interests. Tanden has been a notably scornful foe of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing; former Sanders speechwriter David Sirota calls her “the single biggest, most aggressive Bernie Sanders critic in the United States.” Who better to oversee the budget of the U.S. government? By Norman Solomon
Purge of 4,000 Georgia Voters Violated Federal Law, Judge Rules After two counties in Georgia sought to purge thousands of voters from registration rolls using unreliable data from national change-of-address forms, a federal judge ruled that the attempt to disenfranchise these voters was improper and illegal. U.S. District Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner (who is also the sister of former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams) issued a decision on Monday against the moves by officials in Muscogee County and Ben Hill County to displace residents from being registered to vote. Her decision ensures that more than 4,000 voters will remain registered in those counties, allowing them to vote in upcoming Senate runoff elections in the state scheduled for next week. By Chris Walker
Inviting Nuclear Disaster Nuclear power plants when they began being constructed were not seen as running for more than 40 years because of radioactivity embrittling metal parts and otherwise causing safety problems. But in recent decades, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has extended the operating licenses of nuclear power plants from 40 years to 60 years and then 80 years, and is now considering 100 years. By Karl Grossman
Environment:
Antarctica’s Melting Ice Shelves Are Dangerous Half of Antarctica’s ice shelves could collapse in a flash, Live Science reports. The article points out that this could result from ongoing global warming. As meltwater rushes through the cracks in the Antarctic ice shelves, it can destroy the ice shelves in minutes or hours. This is amplified by the warming atmosphere, and as the warming continues, this phenomenon may happen more often than not. A study published back in August showed that at least half of the ice shelves are at risk of having this happening. The study suggested that around 50% to 70% of the ice shelves holding Antarctic glaciers in place could become weak and even collapse with surges of meltwater. Ching-Yao Lai, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Marine Geology & Geophysics at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York and lead author of the study said, “What we find is that the amount of melting is important, but where the melting happens is also important. By Johnna Crider
Ecosystem Destruction Fueled the Pandemic. Pollution Has Made It Worse On December 30, 2019, an urgent email circulated on the internet, in which the Wuhan Municipal Health Committee noted the treatment of multiple patients with “pneumonia of unknown cause.” Since then, researchers have identified antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in blood and spit samples in the United States, France and Italy, suggesting human exposure to the virus may have occurred well before that first cluster in Wuhan, China. Scientists have a long road ahead in pinpointing the exact conditions under which COVID-19 originated. But the job is underway. The World Health Organization and a Lancet COVID-19 Commission are in the midst of attempting to trace COVID’s origin story to determine how public health officials might prevent pandemics of similar proportions in the future. In the meantime, epidemiologists agree that humans most likely got the virus from bats, through a transfer linked to the same changes in land use that contribute to the climate crisis. By Leanna First-Arai
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
In the New Jim Crow–Prison-industrial Complex, Incarceration is a Death Sentence!: Advocates Call for Medical Parole to Avoid ‘Unintentional Death Sentences’ as Covid-19 Ravages US Prisons “The bottom line is, there are still thousands of people who are at very high risk of death trapped in a prison system where there’s no way that they can avoid the virus.” As the Covid-19 pandemic ravages prisoners worse than nearly every other U.S. population cohort, prison reform advocates and public health experts are renewing calls for the medical parole of inmates—especially those at risk for death or serious complications due to pre-existing health conditions. By Brett Wilkins
How Past Economic Policies Influenced Racism of Today The war on drugs, started by Richard Nixon but made famous by Reagan and his wife, Nancy, ushered in a reign of terror of sorts for working-class Black families like Floyd’s Though the 2020 murder of George Floyd inspired a global racial reckoning, the injustices he faced date back to his childhood in the 1980s. By Sarah Lahm
Labor:
Economy:
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Deepening Economic Woes and Soaring Inflation Ahead
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Underlying Economic and Labor Numbers through November Indicate Contracting or Flattening Fourth-Quarter 2020 GDP, Well Shy of Economic Recovery
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On Top of Downside Revisions, Declining November Real Retail Sales Showed Renewed Economic Deterioration
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November New-Home Sales Collapsed by a Meaningful 11.1% (-11.1%) in the Month, On Top of Major Downside Revisions to Sales in Each of the Prior Three Months
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November Industrial Production and Its Dominant Manufacturing Sector Showed Deepening Year-to-Year Declines
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While the Mining Sector Showed a Narrowed Annual Plunge, Thanks to Rising Oil Prices
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Federal Reserve Sees Continuing Need for Inflation-Boosting Monetary Stimulus, With No Economic Recovery Expected Before 2023
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Continuing Massive Expansions of Federal Government Deficit Spending and Federal Reserve Monetary Stimulus Promise Massive Inflation
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Liquidity-Strapped Consumers Move to Cash, Spiking Traditional Money Supply M1
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Minimizing Reporting of Such, the Fed Just Redefined Money Supply M1; Given Newly Defined M1-Like Liquidity Characteristics for M2 Savings Deposits, Savings Have Been Shifted Retroactively from M2 to into M1, Effective as of May 2020
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Redefined November Money Supply M1 Just Jumped from 31.7% to 92.7% of Total M2; November 2020 Year-to-Year Growth in the Traditional Money Supply M1 Soared to a Record 53.2%, the Redefined New Series Reflects a Record 348.4% Jump
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Weakening U.S. Dollar, Rebounding Gold and Oil Prices Foreshadow Rising Inflation
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GDP (2000 to “Final” Third-Estimate of Third-Quarter 2020)
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Quarterly Real Gross Domestic Product 1q2000 to “Final” Estimate 3q2020, Billions of 2012 Dollars Seasonally-Adjusted [ShadowStats, BEA]
These Are the Very Real Dangers to the U.S. Economy of Not Issuing $2,000 Stimulus Checks The question of just how much fiscal stimulus and COVID-19 relief payments are needed right now in order to prevent the U.S. economy from going off a cliff requires a recognition of what we do not know about the actual fragility of the U.S. economy over the next 12 months and the current fragility of the financial system of the United States. We start from the factual premise that the current financial crisis did not originate as a result of the pandemic. The plumbing of the financial system broke on September 17, 2019, months before the first COVID-19 case was discovered anywhere in the world. We know this because this is the date that the Federal Reserve announced it would begin acting as lender of last resort to the repo loan market on Wall Street. (Repos are a form of borrowing where banks, brokerage firms, hedge funds and mutual funds engage in short term loans, typically overnight, which are collateralized with safe securities such as Treasury notes.) By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
The UK’s Brexit Shoddy Deal Surrenders More Than It Receives Faced with the grim reality of leaving the EU without a deal, Boris Johnson was always going to hail any “least-worst” deal as a “victory”. And so he did. A jubilant BoJo, ever the lying blusterer, claims his deal is everything the electorate voted for in the 2016 referendum and in last year’s general election. It certainly isn’t, if one scrutinizes the details. By Kenneth Surin
Book Review: ‘Out of Mesopotamia’ Is a Great War Novel Iranian-American author captures how combat has a Peter Pan quality, allowing fighters, as well as war correspondents, to escape from the drudgery of daily life and never grow up. of Saleh, a jaded, middle-aged Iranian reporter – one suspects a bit like Abdoh himself – who accompanies Shia militias, as Abdoh did, in Iraq and Syria during the heavy fighting between 2014 and 2017. A few thousand Iranian soldiers, including members of Iran’s elite Quds Force, along with thousands of Iranian volunteers, entered Syria and Iraq to assist the governments of Iraq and Syria in the battle against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS). ISIS, which at its height held about a third of Syria and 40 percent of Iraq, is led by Sunni Muslim extremists who consider the Shia Muslims apostates. ISIS has murdered thousands of Shias in mass executions and destroyed numerous Shia shrines and mosques. The Iranian-backed Shia fighters were vital in the crushing of the Sunni jihadists and functioned, for a time, as de facto allies of the United States, although the American forces, as Abdoh writes, “despised our skin and our faces and our weapons.” The Americans saw the Shia fighters, he writes, as “rodents, and we saw them as a hollow Goliath.” The fighting was chaotic, brutal and often senseless. Factions abruptly changed sides, as in all civil wars, to decimate those who a few days earlier were their allies. By Chris Hedges
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 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
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:
Shadow. Governent Statistics Flash Commentary, Issue No. 1454 Money Supply, FOMC, Industrial Production, Retail Sales, Housing Starts and Cass Freight Index®
