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Images Of the Day:
Affordable Housing Is an Oxymoron: I live in an ‘Affordable Senior Hosuing’ Complex, in less 7 years my rent has gone up over $1200per Month!: “Affordable Housing”
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:
‘When Silence Becomes a Betrayal’: I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: ‘A time comes when silence is betrayal’.: That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. — Martin Luther King, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence .
Though not yet under the Affordable Housing moniker, 1959 marked the federal government’s first significant use of financial incentives—in this case, below market interest rates—to entice private developers to build rental housing for constituencies they failed to serve: seniors who earned too much to qualify for public housing but too little to rent in the private market. The first programs were limited to nonprofit developers, but over the next few years, for-profit builders lobbied for inclusion and shaped new programs with 1 percent effective interest rates, easy exit strategies, and other beneficial terms. Eligibility expanded, too, to all the “forgotten families,” as President Kennedy called them, of the middle class. — The Enduring Fiction of Affordable Housing!
The Greater Gila region is an exceptional landscape. It is exceptional for its biodiversity, which is greater than that of Yellowstone. It is exceptional for its cultural significance, as it is the traditional homelands for 18 different federally recognized tribes. It is exceptional for its cultural history, which dates back to over 10,000 years ago. It is exceptional for its size and scale, at over 10 million acres, five different ecoregions, four different designated wilderness areas, and three separate mountain ranges. And it is exceptional for the place that it holds in the hearts and minds of many New Mexicans, as a place to backpack deep into the Black Range Mountains, a place to fish in our state’s last free flowing river, to star gaze under unparalleled dark skies, to experience the elk hunt of a lifetime. There is no other landscape in the West that is both an ecological and cultural nexus cherished by so many. — Threats to the Greater Gila: an Imperiled Landscape Under Siege
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
Animals in a Factory Farm Have More Space: As Biden Ramps Up Detention Capacity, Group Warns Contaminated Military Bases ‘Are No Place’ for Kids “Military bases filled with contaminated sites are no place for the healthy development of any child.” —Melissa Legge, Earthjustice “Immigrant children under the care of the federal government should not be in cages, let alone toxic sites in military bases,” an Earthjustice attorney said. By Kenny Stancil
The For the People Act Must Pass In Whole “There is nothing to indicate that taking out key democracy reforms from the bill will improve the chances of passing S. 1.” “There is absolutely no reason for supporters of S. 1 to negotiate with ourselves and dramatically narrow the reforms in the bill. All this will do is play into the hands of reform opponents who then wouldn’t have to lift a finger to get rid of most of the major democracy reforms in S. 1 they oppose. By Fred Wertheimer
Environment:
Fairewinds Nuclear Spring Series: Humanity Rising Presentation: 10 Years Deep – Nuclear Power Disaster in Japan Today, we add another post and discussion to Fairewinds Energy Education’s new Nuclear Spring Series. As I said for the first blog post in this series, the aftermath of the three meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi atomic power reactor site on Japan’s East Coast on March 11, 2011, has changed our personal and professional lives forever. In case you missed it: please read our first post in Fairewinds Nuclear Spring Series entitled Japan Hasn’t Recovered 10 Years After Fukushima Meltdowns, published here on our Demystifying Nuclear Power Blog. Every year different groups ask us to talk about the Fukushima Meltdowns to commemorate the ongoing tragedy. Worldwide many people have forgotten about Fukushima or altogether assume that the disaster is over. Fukushima is not over and will be ongoing for thousands of years. By Maggie Gundersen
Primary Rainforest Destruction Increased 12% from 2019 to 2020 The tropics lost 12.2 million hectares of tree cover in 2020, according to new data from the University of Maryland and available on Global Forest Watch. Of that, 4.2 million hectares, an area the size of the Netherlands, occurred within humid tropical primary forests, which are especially important for carbon storage and biodiversity. The resulting carbon emissions from this primary forest loss (2.64 Gt CO2) are equivalent to the annual emissions of 570 million cars, more than double the number of cars on the road in the United States. Primary forest loss was 12% higher in 2020 than the year before and the second year in a row that primary forest loss worsened in the tropics. By Mikaela Weisse and Elizabeth Goldman
‘EPA Needs to Step In’: Florida Workers Race to Prevent Massive Spill of Radioactive Waste “Federal officials need to clean up this mess the fertilizer industry has dumped on Florida communities and immediately halt further phosphogypsum production.” “With 24 more phosphogypsum stacks storing more than one billion tons of this dangerous, radioactive waste in Florida, the EPA needs to step in right now.”—Jaclyn Lopez, Center for Biological Diversity By Jake Johnson
Six Ways Chevron Imperils Climate, Human Rights, and Racial Justice “These six examples illustrate a stunning array of corporate abuse, deception, and misconduct by one of the world’s largest and most powerful corporations.” Although we’re barely one quarter into 2021, multiple forces are squeezing Chevron for the preventable harm it is inflicting on the global climate. The company is also being dragged for its greenwashing, its role in perpetuating racial injustice in the United States, and its violations of Indigenous peoples’ rights and other human rights from Burma/Myanmar to Ecuador. By Kathy Mulvey
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
When Black People Have to Give Their Children ‘The Talk’ This is the Result of Centuries of Systemic Police Terrorism — Roland Sheppard
Calling Chauvin a “Bad Apple” Denies Systemic Nature of Racist Police Violence As the murder trial of Derek Chauvin for killing George Floyd proceeds, the prosecution will try to portray the defendant as a “bad apple.” In his opening statement, prosecutor Jerry Blackwell alerted the jurors that they would hear police officials testify Chauvin used excessive force in violation of departmental policy to apply restraints only as necessary to bring a person under control. However, this argument obfuscates the racist violence inherent in the U.S. system of policing. By Marjorie Cohn
Understanding the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Legacy of White Supremacy In December, The New York Times published a story revealing how ExxonMobil and other oil companies had paid a public relations firm named FTI to build “news” and information websites falsely suggesting grassroots support for the fossil fuel industry and its initiatives. ExxonMobil, which didn’t speak with Times reporter (and my former coworker) Hiroko Tabuchi for the story, responded by trying to smear the messenger. “We refused to work with the author,” ExxonMobil tweeted, “because of her obvious bias against the oil and gas industry.” The firm was alluding to an October tweet by Tabuchi that she’d “been thinking a lot about fossil fuels and white supremacy recently,” noting that nearly every oil industry official she’d encountered as a reporter was white and male. ExxonMobil complained the tweet was a “baseless claim alleging industry links to white supremacy,” and Tabuchi later deleted it. But according to University of Notre Dame historian Darren Douchuk, Tabuchi’s tweet reflected something real. “In researching the history of oil in modern America since the 1860s to the present, oil was I think unquestionably the most racially homogenous industry in America. And, there are clear racist patterns of organization within the industry from the very beginning,” says Douchuk, author of Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America. By Kendra Pierre-Louis
Labor:
The Working Class It has Been In A Depression, No Proseperity Fpr Them!: The Since June 2009 Americans have lived in the false reality of a recovering economy. Various fake news and manipulated statistics have been used to create this false impression. However, indicators that really count have not supported the false picture and were ignored. For example, it is normal in a recovering or expanding economy for the labor force participation rate to rise as people enter the workforce to take advantage of the job opportunities. During the decade of the long recovery, from June 2009 through March2021, the labor force participation rate consistently fell from 65.7 to 6261.5 percent. —Paul Craig Roberts, The Diminishing American Economy (Updated)
Saint Louis Freded Reserve Bank: Civiian abor Force Participation is 61.5% 
Shadow Government Statistics Alternate Unemployment Charts: The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers. The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment. Alternate Unemployment is 25.7%!
Economy:
The Fedral Reaserve BankHas Been Giving $Trillions. in Low-Ibterest the Wall Street Banks, The Situation Gets Compoundes ! Financial Fictions: The Old Ones: On getting God’s word, he set up what is called a ‘family office’, Archegos Capital Management, and eventually built up its trading positions running into the tens of billions of dollars with Wall Street banks, including some of the ones his old firm was accused of cheating. Hwang’s downfall came last week when he was unable to meet margin calls on derivatives trades, known as equity swaps, that he had struck with several investment banks. These instruments gave speculators the option to gain from stock positions without having to own the underlying shares himself. As Marx put it some 150 years ago in Capital, “Profit can be made purely from trading in a variety of financial claims existing only on paper…. Indeed, profit can be made by using only borrowed capital to engage in (speculative) trade, not backed up by any tangible asset.” By Michael Roberts 
JPMorgan’s Federally-Insured Bank Holds $2.65 Trillion in Stock Derivatives; How Did It Avoid the Archegos Blowup? “This raises the serious question as to whether the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees should be investigating the gamification of markets or the monetization of the stock market via Wall Street’s ownership of federally insured deposits.” In late March, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released its quarterly report on “Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities.” Graph 15 of the report shows that using data submitted by banks on their form RC-R of their call reports, JPMorgan Chase’s federally insured bank had exposure to $2.65 trillion in notional equity (stock) derivatives as of December 31, 2020. (Notional means face amount.) By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
NUMSA Demands the Immediate Release of American Political Prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), as the biggest trade union in South Africa, and one of the largest on the African continent, has made an urgent call to the Governor of Pennsylvania in the U.S. Mr. Tom Wolf to intervene in the case of Mr. Mumia Abu-Jamal.
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
Some Eligible People Are Being Denied COVID Vaccines. Chances Are It’s Illegal. Vaccinations for the coronavirus are supposed to be free and available to all Americans regardless of insurance or immigration status. For some, that isn’t how it has been playing out. Here are common false barriers to look out for. As the United States seeks to end its coronavirus crisis and outrun variants, public health officials recognize it is essential for as many people as possible to get vaccinated. Making that easy is a major part of the plan. According to the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, the vaccine is supposed to be free to everyone, whether they’re insured or not. And the Biden administration has directed all vaccination sites to accept undocumented immigrants as a “moral and public health imperative.” But this promise has not always been fulfilled, ProPublica has found. By Caroline Chen and Maryam Jameel
The Enduring Fiction of Affordable Housing! These public-private partnerships skate by on their complexity and branding, but they undermine a future where housing is a right. Isela Gracian, who worked for 16 years at the nonprofit housing developer East Los Angeles Community Corporation, serving the last five as president, affirms the biases of financial incentives. “For some community members [our rents] were still out of reach, especially when we’re talking about folks that are on fixed incomes,” she explained. When putting together the “thousand-piece puzzle” to finance a single project, “the challenge is being able to get more units at the lower income thresholds. That’s largely because in this model of Affordable Housing development, the property ends up, in essence, with a mortgage. These are loans that the developer needs to pay back, so the rents need to be able to sustain that.” Even with Affordable Housing subsidies, the private market cannot meet the needs of the working class and the poor. That contradiction means Affordable Housing helps accelerate gentrification. In poorer neighborhoods, and those where most residents are people of color, new housing that fails to serve the needs of the existing community will inevitably facilitate the influx of richer, whiter residents. While boosters celebrate the long-term, citywide impact of increasing housing supply, tenants face its immediate, local consequences: an increase in property values means rising rents, landlord harassment, eviction, and the loss of community ties. One stark illustration of this process is tax increment financing, by which resources for Affordable Housing are derived from property values rising in the surrounding community—“affordable housing” funded through its own gentrifying impact.
Another Example Capitalism as a Failed System: World Capilalism Was Aware of the Danger of Cornovavirus Threat Over 5 Years Ago and Did Nothing!: Under Capitalism — Human Lives Don’t Matter Capitalism Does Not, and Never Has, Worked for the Masses! In Its Death Agony, Capitalism Is Traveling About The World Like The Four Horsemen of the The Apocalypse, Spreading Racism, War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. The future of Humanity Is Now At stake!
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!