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Image of the Day:
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!
Quotes 0f the Day:
Trump fueled the Attack on the Capitol with his Goebbels-worthy grand theft election story. For weeks, Trump had been telling his supporters to come to Washington to stop the certification. On December 19th he tweeted this: “Statistically impossible to have lost the Election” and “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there… be wild!” Nine days later, former Trump White House official Olivia Troye said that she was “very concerned that there will be violence on January 6th because the president himself encourages it. This is what [President Trump] does. He tweets. He incites. He gets his followers and supporters to behave in this manner, and these people think that they’re being patriotic because they are supporting Donald Trump. — On Trump’s Next Absurd Acquittal
But Democrats made some very unambiguous promises during the Georgia Senate race—promises that won them both votes and campaign contributions. “If you send Jon and the Reverend to Washington,” said President Biden, “those $2,000 checks will go out the door, restoring hope and decency and honor for so many people who are struggling right now.” Campaign events also featured a giant mockup of a $2,000 check. . . . People were promised a $2,000 check. They even saw a picture of it. Now they’re being told they’ll get a $1,400 check—and that they were stupid for ever believing what they heard and saw. — Note to Democrats: $1400 + $600 Does NOT Equal $2000
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
Study Finds Climate Crisis Driving Great White Sharks Into Colder Waters, With Devastating Effect on Wildlife The sharks are not the problem—climate change is the problem.”—Kyle Van Houtan,Monterey Bay Aquarium Warming oceans—a key meausure of the climate crisis—are forcing great white sharks into colder waters, where they are causing a devastating decrease in wildlife populations, according to new research reported Tuesday by The Guardian. By Brett Wilkins
Wild Flowers and Bees Contend With Climate Heat By Many alpine flowers could soon fade out. Some bees may be buzzing off. The wild things are victims of climate heat. Thanks to climate heat, this could be the last farewell to mossy saxifrage, to alpine wormwood and mignonette-leafed bittercress. With them could go plants most people could hardly name: dwarf cudweed, alpine stonecrop, mossy cyphel, cobweb houseleek and two kinds of hawkweed. All of them are mountain-dwellers, hardy little plants that depend for their existence on alpine glaciers.And almost everywhere in the world, high-altitude rivers of ice are in retreat. Global heating, climate change and human disturbance alter both the conditions for growth and the rich variety of life. By Tim Radford
Fossil Fuel Pollution Caused Nearly 1 in 5 Premature Deaths in 2018, Study Finds Anew study has found that burning fossil fuels has caused millions more premature deaths annually due to particulate matter that’s released in the combustion of fuels like coal and oil. Researchers at universities in the U.K. and at Harvard University estimated that, in 2018, 8.7 million people died prematurely due to pollution released by fossil fuels, or about 18 percent of total global deaths that year. This is nearly double previous estimates of 4.2 million deaths annually around the globe attributable to fossil fuel pollution. By Sharon Zhang
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Chapter 5, The New Jim Crow: Obama—the Promise and the Peril By Michelle Alexander 
This dynamic poses particular risks for racial justice advocacy during an Obama presidency. On the one hand, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency creates an extraordinary opportunity for those seeking to end the system of mass incarceration in America. Obama’s stated positions on criminal justice reform suggest that he is opposed to the War on Drugs and the systematic targeting of African Americans for mass incarceration.48 Shouldn’t we trust him, now that he is holding the reins of power, to do the right thing? Trust is tempting, especially because Obama himself violated our nation’s drug laws and almost certainly knows that his life would not have unfolded as it did if he had been arrested on drug charges and treated like a common criminal. As he wrote in his memoir about his wayward youth, “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it.” Unlike Bill Clinton, who famously admitted he experimented with marijuana on occasion “but didn’t inhale,” Obama has never minimized his illegal drug use. As he said in a 2006 speech to the American Society of Magazine Editors, “Look, you know, when I was a kid, I inhaled. Frequently. That was the point.”49 Those “bad decisions,” Obama has acknowledged, could have led him to a personal dead end. “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d have been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man.” No doubt if Obama had been arrested and treated like a common criminal, he could have served years in prison and been labeled a drug felon for life. What are the chances he would have gone to Harvard Law School, much less become president of the United States, if that had happened? It seems reasonable to assume that Obama, who knows a little something about poverty and the temptations of drugs, would have a “there but for the grace of God go I” attitude about the millions of African and Latino men imprisoned for drug offenses comparable to his own or saddled for life with felony records. But before we kick back, relax, and wait for racial justice to trickle down, consider this: Obama chose Joe Biden, one of the Senate’s most strident drug warriors, as his vice president. The man he picked to serve as his chief of staff in the White House, Rahm Emanuel, was a major proponent of the expansion of the drug war and the slashing of welfare rolls during President Clinton’s administration. And the man he tapped to lead the U.S. Department of Justice—the agency that launched and continues to oversee the federal war on drugs—is an African American former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia who sought to ratchet up the drug war in Washington, D.C., and fought the majority black D.C. City Council in an effort to impose harsh mandatory minimums for marijuana possession. . . .
Labor:
Chicago Teachers Might Strike. A Group of Parents, Backed By A Right-Wing Law Firm, Stands to Sue. The conservative movement is capitalizing on school closures to weaken public education. This week in Chicago, as the local teachers union considers whether to strike over the safety of the city’s school reopening plan during the pandemic, a group of at least nine parents represented by the Liberty Justice Center, a conservative public interest law firm, say they’re ready to sue if educators vote for a work stoppage. Lawyers with the Liberty Justice Center — the same legal organization which brought the landmark Janus v. AFSCME lawsuit in 2018 to the U.S Supreme Court — argue a Chicago Teachers Union strike would be in violation of Illinois law and the union’s current collective bargaining agreement. The CTU contract commits to avoiding strikes or pickets while the agreement is in effect. “That doesn’t change even if [Chicago Public Schools] engages in an unfair labor practice or allegedly requires teachers to work in an unsafe environment,” attorney Jeffrey Schwab wrote recently in the Chicago Tribune. “It has become clear that kids are collateral damage for the union’s political and financial leverage.” By Rachel M. Cohen
Economy:
Janet Yellen’s Slush Fund to Meddle in Markets Got a $490 Billion Haircut Remember all the hubbub in the fall of last year when then U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin demanded in a November 19 letter that the Fed return all of the money from the CARES Act that it had not used for emergency lending programs. Mnuchin’s stated reason for the demand was because he was going to turn the unused funds over to the general fund of the Treasury so that Congress could reappropriate it for other purposes. At the time, Mnuchin made it sound like the Fed had been sitting on the bulk of the $454 billion that the CARES Act had allotted to be used as loss-absorbing capital for the Fed’s emergency lending programs. In reality, Mnuchin had never turned over the bulk of the CARES Act money to the Fed, but had parked it instead in a Treasury slush fund known as the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF). It should be noted that there was not one word in the CARES Act legislation that authorized Mnuchin to put the money in the ESF. (See Research Arm of Congress Confirms that Mnuchin Never Released Bulk of CARES Act Money Earmarked for Fed’s Emergency Loans.) By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
Venezuela: Maduro Accuses Left and Communist Party of Being Agents of Imperialism In the last few weeks, there has been an escalation in the verbal attacks from the Venezuelan government against the revolutionary left. These attacks, by president Maduro and National Assembly speaker Jorge Rodríguez, have been directed particularly at the APR: the Popular Revolutionary Alternative, a political platform that gathers several parties and organisations to the left of Maduro’s government. Very serious allegations have been made, including the charge that the left opposition to the government is acting in cahoots with US imperialism. Up until now, the attacks against the APR had consisted of intimidation, censorship in the public and private media, and several acts of repression against APR candidates during the National Assembly election campaign. The most important and serious thing here is that these latest attacks could set the stage for a higher level of repression against the left wing and the workers’ movement.By Ernesto León (Corriente Marxista Internacional – Lucha de Clases)
Myanmar’s Labor Movement Is Central to the Fight Against Authoritarianism On Monday [1 February], Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup d’etat, deposing former international darling Aung San Suu Kyi. The military putsch dramatically exposed Myanmar’s widely lauded democratic transition — which came to the world’s attention with the freeing of Suu Kyi in 2010 and the first democratic election in decades in 2015 — as fundamentally flawed. The 2008 constitution that governs the country grants the military full control over key ministries and broad authority to declare a state of emergency. The question of how Myanmar’s people will respond now looms large. Suu Kyi and her party remain popular in the country despite her brutal record — which includes enabling the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims — because they’re seen as representing an end to military rule and an increased openness to the world. Meanwhile, the medical staff in major cities have called for a strike, the country’s largest labor federation is urging people not to cooperate with the military government on labor issues, and a Facebook group titled “civil disobedience movement” has drawn a hundred eighty thousand likes. Myanmar’s labor movement was building even before partial democratization. A major strike wave swept the country’s mostly foreign-owned garment factories in 2009–10, which the government met with coercion: quartering off factories and forcing workers and employers to come to a deal, undercutting the momentum of the movement. By Kevin Lin, Ma Moe Sandar Myint, and Michael Haack
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!
Envoronment: