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Images 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 of the Day:
Christmas In the Trenches by John McCutcheon ©1984 John McCutcheon/Appalsongs (ASCAP). My name is Francis Tolliver, I come from Liverpool,
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders to Germany to here
I fought for King and country I love dear.
‘Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung,
The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung,
Our families back in England were toasting us that day,
Their brave and glorious lads so far away.
I was lying with my messmate on the cold and rocky ground
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound
Says I, “Now listen up, me boys!” each soldier strained to hear
As one young German voice sang out so clear.
“He’s singing bloody well, you know!” my partner says to me
Soon one by one each German voice joined in in harmony
The cannons rested silent, the gas clouds rolled no more
As Christmas brought us respite from the war.
As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent
“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” struck up some lads from Kent
The next they sang was “Stille Nacht,” “Tis ‘Silent Night.’” says I
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky.
“There’s someone coming towards us!” the front line sentry cried
All sights were fixed on one lone figure coming from their side
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shone on that plain so bright
As he bravely strode unarmed into the night.
Soon one by one on either side walked into No Man’s land
With neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand
We shared some secret brandy and we wished each other well
And in a flare-lit soccer game we gave ‘em hell.
We traded chocolates, cigarettes, and photographs from home
These sons and fathers far away from families of their own
Young Sanders played his squeeze box and they had a violin
This curious and unlikely band of men.
Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more
With sad farewells we each began to settle back to war
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wondrous night
“Whose family have I fixed within my sights?”
‘Twas Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung
For the walls they’d kept between us to exact the work of war
Had been crumbled and were gone for evermore.
My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War I I’ve learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we’re the same.
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 ownershipof the Reublicrats, who profit from war and the war budget, voted 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. Tax the Rich! — They Can Afford To Pay!
It’s Past Time For Democrats To Defy the Supreme Court Our democracy is in a crisis, with many thoughtful and not-prone-to-hysteria commentators are wondering out loud if the Republican embrace of Trumpism has gone so far that it may take the entire country over the edge. A brilliant recent analysis is Thomas Edsall’s article in yesterday’s New York Times, How to Tell When Your Country Is Past the Point of No Return, bookended by Barton Gellman’s shocking piece in The Atlantic, Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun. Both deal with the immediate crisis brought to us by the six years that Trump has dominated the American political scene and his takeover of the Republican Party. But neither is addressing the core problem America is facing that helped bring us Trump, but goes deeper than him: money. Specifically, money — bribery — in politics that has been legalized and expanded by reactionary “conservatives” on the Supreme Court. But what if Congress could tell the Supreme Court it disagrees that bribery of politicians should be legal, constitutional, and takes its own steps to solve that problem? The majority of Americans, for example, want their drug prices to be reasonable like they are in Canada or Europe: the reason we pay as much as 10 times more than citizens of those countries is because the Supreme Court made it legal for the big drug companies and their lobbying groups to bribe our federal politicians. The Same Is True For A Wide Variety Of Issues Where Federal Law Is Wildly At Odds With What The Public Wants Fixed:
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almost $2 trillion in student loan debt
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strengthening Social Security and Medicare
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bankster bailouts
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health insurance ripoffs
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billions in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry
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billionaires paying 1% to 3% in income taxes (and corporations paying nothing) while average folks get soaked
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60,000+ factories moved offshore (along with tens of millions of good-paying jobs)
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employers like Amazon and Kellogg’s engaging in blatant unionbusting
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internet companies tracking your every move and every keystroke and then selling that information without your permission
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climate change
Only a Quarter of the $9 Billion HUD Got to Combat COVID Impacts Has Been Spent Tucked in the massive pandemic relief act in March 2020 was about $9 billion for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to divvy up between cities and states for housing-related coronavirus fallout. The funds could be used on rental assistance for tenants struggling to pay their landlords, housing homeless people in safe, sanitary rooms rather than in crowded shelters and the creation of pop-up COVID-19 testing sites and hospital overflow facilities, among many other uses.Twenty months later, states and cities have spent only about a quarter of that money.
CIA: Central Intionational Assassination Agency!: Oliver Stone’s New JFK Revisited Disproves Official Story: Reveals U.S. Intelligence Involvement in Assassination Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone has come out with a new documentary film, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, which offers excellent evidence of U.S. intelligence’s tragic assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November of 1963. The film is subtitled “through the looking glass” likely due to its coverage of several other CIA atrocities of that time. The film is intermixed with the great promise JFK held out in bringing about a more peaceful foreign policy and civil rights at home. Oliver Stone enlisted longtime JFK assassination researcher James DiEugenio to write the screenplay for the film. DiEugenio had written the books Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba and the Garrison Case and, with Oliver Stone, The JFK Assassination. The film, now being presented on Showtime, moves well between physical evidence around the assassination cover-up, and political evidence of how U.S. intelligence set up this assassination in advance with the aid of powerful forces.
Environment:
100 years ago, Rosa Luxemburg Raised the Slogan: Socialism or Barbarism! Today’s Slogan is Ecosocialism or Ecocide!
“BASF’s footprint of cancer-causing air pollution is larger than that of any other foreign-owned company in the U.S. and is the fourth-largest toxic footprint among all companies operating in this country, according to our analysis.” Remarkable expose on the world’s largest chemical maker, BASF, which makes ingredients for products from soaps to surface cleaners to dishwasher detergent and subjects 1.5 million people to elevated cancer risks. Also take note of its darkest chapter: “In 1925, BASF helped found IG Farben, a German chemical cartel that would not only supply raw materials for the Nazi war machine but also operate a synthetic rubber and oil factory dependent on slave labor from Jewish people imprisoned at the Monowitz concentration camp. Among the cartel’s contributions to the Nazis was a pesticide known as Zyklon B, which they used to exterminate more than 1 million people during the Holocaust.” Sandra Steingraber. ˚ The Dirty Secret of America’s Clean Dishes
Scientist Rebellion: New research shows that countries transgress biophysical boundaries faster than they achieve social thresholds. In 1992, 32-55% of countries overshot biophysical boundaries while in 2015 this rose to 50-66%. While more countries were able to increase life expectancy and education, the number of countries who were able to meet social support and equality decreased in this time period. The research predicts that without deep transformation, the ecological crisis will deepen and we will fail to eliminate social shortfalls. Don’t let leaders tell you that we need to exploit the environment to reach the sustainable development goals. The data shows clearly that we are failing to meet those goals despite higher exploitation rates. By exploiting the biophysical world, we are weakening the resilience that we need to safeguard human and planetary health. The research is based on the doughnut-shaped ´safe and just space´ framework that includes 11 social and 6 biophysical indicators. It has been published in Nature Sustainability and can be read here:
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Labor:
No Equal Pay for Equal Work! The new contract offers a way out of the lower tier, according to HuffPost’s Dave Jamieson, by automatically advancing workers who have been at the company for 4 years and then capping other advances at 3 percent of the workforce each year. This is better than the original contract offered by the company, which didn’t expand opportunities for growth, but it does not succeed in eliminating the system of a two-tiered workforce for the same jobs. — Kellogg Strike Ends After 11 Weeks as Workers Approve New Contract
Economy:
15th WAPE Panel ‘A Critical Review of Financialization’ Top Marxist economists critique the ‘financialisation thesis’ in a panel at the 15th Forum of the World Association for Political Economy
Shadow Government Statistics Ge n e r a l H e a d l i n e s: Pandemic-Driven U.S. Economic Collapse Continues to Harden in a Protracted “L”-Shaped Non-Recovery with a Potential Renewed Downturn
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Key Economic Series Show Not Only That the Pandemic-Driven Economic Collapse Has Been Worse Than Headlined, But Also That the Still-Unfolding Recovery Has Been Much Weaker Than Indicated
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Severe Systemic Structural Damage from the Shutdown Is Forestalling Meaningful Economic Rebound into 2023 or Beyond, Irrespective of the Advances in Coronavirus Vaccinations
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Panicked, Unlimited Federal Reserve Money Creation and Federal Government Deficit Spending Continue and Likely Will Expand, Fueling Accelerating, Major Domestic Inflation
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With Fundamental Dollar Debasement Intensifying, Holding Physical Gold and Silver Protects the Purchasing Power of One’s Assets, Irrespective of Any Near-Term Central Bank or Other Machinations to the Contrary
A Bloomberg Column Says the Macho Culture and Risk-Taking on Wall Street Is Dead – In the Same Year That It Blew Up Archegos with 85 Percent Margin Loans Two interesting things happened this week just one day apart. On Monday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the regulator of national banks, released its quarterly report on “Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities” which documented insane levels of risk at four federally-insured banks, which have merged themselves with Wall Street’s trading casinos to form Frankenbanks. The very next day, an opinion columnist at Bloomberg News, Jared Dillian, wrote a column lamenting the “loss of risk-taking” on Wall Street which he appears to blame on “excessive compliance and regulation.” The column was given the pity-party title: “The Wall Street That I Once Knew No Longer Exists.”
World:
Che Guevara: Love of Living Humanity:: At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. Perhaps it is one of the great dramas of the leader that he or she must combine a passionate spirit with a cold intelligence and make painful decisions without flinching. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, of the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the level where ordinary people put their love into practice. The leaders of the revolution have children just beginning to talk, who are not learning to say “daddy”; their wives, too, must be part of the general sacrifice of their lives in order to take the revolution to its destiny. The circle of their friends is limited strictly to the circle of comrades in the revolution. There is no life outside of it. In these circumstances one must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth in order to avoid dogmatic extremes, cold scholasticism, or an isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity is transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force. The revolutionary, the ideological motor force of the revolution within the party, is consumed by this uninterrupted activity that comes to an end only with death, unless the construction of socialism is accomplished on a world scale. If one’s revolutionary zeal is blunted when the most urgent tasks have been accomplished on a local scale and one forgets about proletarian internationalism, the revolution one leads will cease to be a driving force and sink into a comfortabl. — Socialism and Man in Cuba
Embracing Che: The Man Behind the Myth In 1968, Fidel Castro wrote an impassioned introduction to Che Guevara’s Bolivian Diary in which he noted that in the US “in the most combative demonstrations for civil rights and against the aggression in Vietnam, his image is brandished as a symbol of struggle.” Yes, that was true. Fidel went on to explain, “This is because Che embodies, in its purest and most selfless form, the international spirit that marks the world of today and that will characterize even more the world of tomorrow.” I remember 1968 as a year of nearly unparalleled international solidarity, when Che’s legacy inspired a generation or two that aimed to dismantle American imperialism, make a revolution and usher in genuine socialism world wide. There hasn’t been a year like 1968 since 1968, not even 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down and when protesters in the “pro-democracy movement” were slaughtered by government troops at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Twenty-two years earlier, on 9 October 1967, Che was murdered by Bolivian soldiers with the connivance of the CIA.
Education, Health, 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
2022 Must Be the Year the Left Proactively Shapes the COVID Agenda As we head into the winter holidays nervously checking news about the Omicron variant and rising COVID-19 case numbers, let’s take a moment to think of how a more just society might handle the coming weeks. Schools and many workplaces would offer remote options for the final week before Christmas to slow the spread just before people gather with older relatives and immunocompromised loved ones. Airports and bus stations would have free rapid tests for all passengers traveling for the holidays. Finally, of course, pharmaceutical companies and wealthy nations would have been forced to share vaccine supplies and formulas with the rest of the world, which probably would have prevented Omicron in the first place.
Another Example Capitalism as a Failed System: World Capilalism Ws 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”, is Still True for Today’s World!
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!