Images of the Day:
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!
Capitalism as a Failed System: World Capilalism Has Been Aware of the Comming Catastrophe of Global Warming for Over 5 Decades 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!
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!
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:
From My 1987 Article: Party Congress Backs Gorbachev’s ‘Reforms’: . . . What Gorbachev means by “serious critical analysis” has been spelled out in numerous recent articles in Novy Mir, the Soviet Union’s leading political and literary journal. These articles contend that the centralized planned economy is the basis for the bureaucratic mismanagement of society—not the bureaucracy itself. The articles call for the introduction of a Soviet market economy. . . . — An Organ of the Bourgeoisie — An accurate description of the Soviet bureaucracy was written by Leon Trotsky in “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International” exactly 50 years ago. Trotsky wrote: The Soviet Union emerged from the October Revolution as a workers’ state. State ownership of the means of production, a necessary prerequisite to socialist development, opened up the possibility of a rapid growth of the productive forces. But the apparatus of the workers’ state underwent a complete degeneration at the same time: It was transformed from a weapon of the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class and more and more a weapon for the sabotage of the country’s economy. . . . The bureaucratization of a backward and isolated workers’ state and the transformation of the bureaucracy into an all- powerful privileged cast constitute the most convincing refutation—not only theoretically but this time practically—of the theory of socialism in one country. The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a degenerated workers’ state. Such is the social diagnosis. The political prognosis has an alternative character: Either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.
Videos of the Day:
“We Can’t Go It Alone”: Jackson, Miss., Mayor Lumumba on Water Catastrophe in Majority-Black City
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 th poor and gives to the Rich. Taxthe Rich! — They Can Afford to Pay!
We Need a New Language of Resistance Amid Far Right’s Calls for Civil War The left must accentuate and embrace a language that is forward-looking and offers the possibility for real change.
Barry Sheppard: United States: Espionage Act A Cudgel to Silence Dissent The FBI raid on former United States President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida resulted in the seizure of 11 sets of “classified” documents. Media coverage of this raid has superseded coverage of Trump’s crime of attempting a coup to overturn the 2020 election of President Joe Biden. This is no cause for celebration. The Department of Justice, which oversees the FBI, got a warrant for the raid to look into whether Trump violated the notorious and misnamed Espionage Act — a 105-year-old law passed in 1917 when the US entered World War One. Former CIA counter-terrorism officer and whistle blower John Kiriakou was indicted under the Espionage Act for exposing the George W Bush adminis-tration’s torture program in the “war on terror”. He served 23 months in prison under the Barack Obama administration. Following the Mar-a-Lago raid, Kiriakou wrote in Consortium News that Trump should not be charged with espionage for taking classified documents home with him when he left the White House. “Nobody should be charged with espionage unless they are working for a foreign power and mean to harm the United States,” wrote Kiriakou. “The Espionage Act … [is] rarely used now to target spies and traitors. Instead, it is used as a cudgel to silence whistle blowers, journalists and occasionally a stupid former president.”
USA: The Democrats’ “Inflation Reduction Act” – A Desperate Attempt to Save Face Biden’s presidency has been a disaster, a reflection of the crisis-ridden system he represents. His approval rating currently stands at a mere 41%—up ever so slightly from a record low of 38%. Congress, which is controlled by Biden’s party, has a 17% approval rate. Another poll says 74% of the country believe it is on the wrong track. These are not good numbers for the November 2022 midterms elections if the Democrats want to retain control—even as they cynically attempt to harness anger over Roe v. Wade to gain votes. All of this is very concerning from the point of view of the ruling class, which hoped Biden could stabilize the situation after the chaotic years of Donald Trump.
Green Group Blasts Biden for Backing Big Oil’s California Offshore Fracking Push This contradicts the administration’s climate goals because fast-tracking offshore fracking will mean more dirty fossil fuels.” A leading environmental group on Wednesday condemned the Biden administration’s attempt to overturn a court ruling that blocked offshore fracking in public waters off the coast of California. “It’s incredibly disappointing to see the Biden administration doing the oil industry’s bidding by defending fracking off the California coast,” Kristen Monsell, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), said in a statement. ” This contradicts the administration’s climate goals because fast-tracking offshore fracking will mean more dirty fossil fuels.”
Environment: Ecocide or Ecosocialism!:
Capitalism is in an Insane Drive for More and More Profits!: ‘The Insanity Continues’: Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Nearly Doubled in 2021 An analysis published this week found that government subsidies bolstering the production and consumption of coal, oil, and gas nearly doubled in 2021, even as climate scientists warned that fossil fuel development must be rapidly cut off if the international community is to have any hope of stopping runaway planetary warming. Data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that 51 governments around the world—including the United States, Germany, Canada, China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia—provided a combined $697.2 billion in tax breaks and other handouts to the fossil fuel industry last year, up from $362.4 billion in 2020. “Fossil fuel subsidies are a roadblock to a more sustainable future,” said the head of the International Energy Agency.
As the World Floods and Burns, It’s Time to Hold Wall Street to Account This fall, we’re calling for a wave of escalated actions on the banks, insurers, and investors funding the climate crisis. Pakistan is responsible for around 0.3% of the total greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere. Yet, that nation of 220 million people is currently experiencing what is undoubtedly a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster.” Much of the country is under water. At least 1,100 people are dead. One million homes have been damaged or destroyed. An estimated 40 million lives have been impacted. It’s a situation that highlights the tragic truth at the heart of the climate crisis: It’s those who have done the least to cause the problem that are bearing the brunt of the impacts
US Has Cut Water Supplies for 7 States During Climate-Induced Drought Water rights activists have long called for more equitable water distribution in areas with dwindling supply. The federal government’s recent announcement that it would impose significant cutbacks in water allocations to the seven states reliant on water from the drought-stricken Colorado River is the latest sign that climate change is ravaging global water systems. Arizona will lose more than 20 percent of its water allocation, and Nevada 8 percent. Northern Mexico, which is also reliant on the Colorado River and has been provided 1.5 million acre feet of water per year from the river since a water-sharing treaty between the two countries was signed in 1944, is being hit hard as well, with a 7 percent reduction in its water allocation from the river. Thirty Indigenous tribes, which have land in the Colorado Basin — and which, as a result of a 1908 Supreme Court decision, have water rights from rivers running through their territories — are also preparing for a more arid future. Some are cutting back their water contributions to state reservoirs; others, in a letter to the Department of the Interior, have noted that they aren’t being adequately consulted on fundamental decisions regarding water usage and distribution in the region.
Idaho Abortion Ban Gives More Rights to Rapist’s Family Than the Pregnant Victim A state law allows the family of a rapist to sue anyone who participated in aborting a fetus generated by the rape.
The Climate Crisis’s Impact Is Worse in Black Cities Facing Disinvestment We speak with an evacuated resident of Jackson, Mississippi, where over 180,000 residents are on their third day without access to running water. We speak with longtime Jackson activist Kali Akuno, co-founder of Cooperation Jackson, who joins us from New Orleans, where he went when floods recently inundated the majority-Black city and shut down the main water plant. He attributes the water crisis to decades of white flight and the subsequent disinvestment in majority-Black and Brown cities. “What we are experiencing now is literally just the crumbling of the empire’s infrastructure,” notes Akuno, who also says he fears the state government will push to privatize or regionalize Jackson’s water system instead of giving the city adequate resources to stabilize it.
How Plants Transformed the Earth’s Makeup. The evolution of land plants caused revolutionary changes from the surface to the deep interior. The evolution of land plants 430 million years ago caused a sudden shift in the chemical composition of Earth’s continents. The findings are published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The evolution of land plants took place about 430 million years ago during the Silurian Period, when North America and Europe were conjoined in a landmass called Pangaea. The proliferation of plants completely transformed Earth’s biosphere — those parts of the planet’s surface where life thrives — paving the way for the advent of dinosaurs about 200 million years later.
Heatwave ‘Supercharged’ by Climate Crisis Poised to Intensify Fires in US West “Our time for the bigger fires is coming up,” said one meteorologist based in Southern California The U.S. West is bracing for a potentially record-shattering heatwave through Labor Day weekend, with experts warning that scorching temperatures are likely to trigger a spike in heatstroke and deaths and set the stage for a possibly catastrophic fire season this fall. Extreme heat—”supercharged” by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, as environmental scientist Jonathan Overpeck put it—has been building this week and is only projected to get worse in the coming days. The National Weather Service in Sacramento has forecast triple-digit highs throughout California’s Central Valley from Thursday until Tuesday. Their counterparts in Los Angeles expect similarly dangerous conditions in southern California from Wednesday through Monday, and even the typically cooler Bay Area is under an excessive heat watch in the coming days.
Environmental Injustice Allowed to Continue Plaguing Alabama By the spring of 2020, the century-old industrial plant on Birmingham’s 35th Avenue was literally falling apart. Chunks of the metal doors fronting several of the 1,800-degree ovens — which heat coal to produce a fuel called coke — had broken off and tumbled to the ground. With the doors damaged, the toxic chemicals they were supposed to contain within the ovens leaked out at an accelerated rate. The fumes should still have been captured by a giant ventilation hood that had been put in place to suck up emissions. But that system was broken, too, causing plumes of noxious smoke to drift across the city’s historically Black north side, as they had done so many times befor.
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Biden Administration Has No Plan for Monkeypox Vaccine Access in Prisons Aziza Ahmed describes it as a public health disaster: a lot of people in tight quarters, inadequate healthcare, staff coming and going and no vaccines. Ahmed is a professor of law and an expert in health legal issues at Boston University. She is among a chorus of public health experts voicing concerns over the federal response to monkeypox in prisons and jails. “At least at a minimum, [monkeypox] will require vaccines and personal protective equipment and places to isolate or quarantine,” said Ahmed. “Vaccines are really the baseline.”
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist: Biden’s Student Loan Scam Capitalist rule dictates that millions of Americans live in debt peonage. It was inevitable that Biden’s student loan debt relief would be a farcical half! The Biden administration announcement of so-called student loan debt relief does little to alleviate the problem it claims to solve. Forgiving $20,000 for Pell grant holders and $10,000 for all who earn less than $125,000 is questionable for a variety of reasons. It is a midterm election bait and switch that pleases gullible democrats, helps only a minority of borrowers, and is nothing like what candidate Biden proposed during the 2020 campaign.
Labor:
A Hot Topic for Labor Day: Extreme Heat Kills Workers The richest country in the history of the world continues to subject millions of its people to senseless suffering and death, not even talking about this embarrassment, much less stopping it. Not only are aloof bosses back at air-cooled headquarters the ones who knowingly subject subordinates to that deadly heat, but they’re also the ones who hire squads of lobbyists and lawyers to kill regulations that could prevent these deaths.
Economy: 
Shadow Government Statitics Daily Update: September 1st to 2nd
- Real Construction Spending continued in deepening monthly, quarterly and annual collapse, an early indication of Third-Quarter 2022 GDP trouble.
- University of Michigan’s August Consumer Sentiment continued its early month improvement, although still holding more than 40% (-40%) below pre-Pandemic levels. A new Recession signal remains intact, with quarterly GDP and GNP contractions in place for both First- and Second-Quarter 2022.
- Indeed, a renewed downturn appears to be in play, despite the intensifying official obfuscation that already is underway.
- The “Preliminary” Payroll Benchmark Revision for March 2022 was minimally to the upside by 0.3%. Headline July 2022 New Orders for Durable Goods were “unchanged” against minimally revised activity in June.
- July Money Supply continued to increase, showing no noticeable slackening suggestive of pending Inflation relief.
- Compounding recent negative news out of the Housing Markets, July 2022 New Home Sales plunged year-to-year by 29.6% (-29.6%) along with declining Existing Home Sales and Residential Construction covered in the August 19th review of these ever-evolving Housing numbers and rapidly deteriorating economic conditions.
- July 2022 Retail Sales, showed an early suggestion of a quarterly contraction in Third-Quarter 2022 inflation-adjusted Real Retail Sales activity, following revisions to and slowing growth in annual and monthly
- July Industrial Production, and the sharp collapse in July Housing Starts to a Pre-Pandemic low.
Here’s What Americans with Security Clearances Are Saying About Trump’s Stash of Top Secret Documents at His Resort Hotel, Mar-a-Lago The above photo was released on Wednesday evening as part of the Justice Department’s court response to Donald Trump’s motion to have a Special Master appointed to review documents seized by the FBI in a raid of his 114-room resort hotel, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida on August 8. Included in the items seized by the government were highly classified documents marked Top Secret/SCI – meaning they were Sensitive Compartmented Information that should have been maintained in a government approved SCIF – Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. The FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago on August 8 followed months of stonewalling by Trump to return government records he had illegally retained after leaving the White House. The records were first demanded by the National Archives. When the National Archives finally received 15 boxes from Trump of improperly taken documents in January, it discovered highly classified material in the boxes and turned the matter over to the Justice Department. Correspondence documenting Trump’s months of stonewalling is attached as exhibits to the Justice Department’s court filing linked above.
World:
Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022): The Man Who Failed to Save Stalinism From Itself Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union, died yesterday at the age of 91. His policies of reforming the USSR ‘from above’, under the banner of glasnost and perestroika, represented an abortive attempt to maintain the privileges of the Stalinist bureaucracy, while also breaking through some of the worst logjams in the Soviet economy. The inevitable failure of these measures opened up the door for the restoration of capitalism in Russia, the destruction of the planned economy, and the impoverishment of millions. This disaster is Gorbachev’s legacy.
Strikewave builds Across Britain – But Where Is Unison? Across the country, the trade union movement is awakening and workers are moving into action. But one union is notable by its absence – the biggest in the country: Unison. The need for fighting leadership has never been greater. A strikewave is growing and spreading across both the public and private sector, with workers everywhere facing real-terms wage cuts, spiralling fuel and energy costs, and great uncertainty. First up were railway workers in the RMT, who have downed tools over attacks on jobs, wages, conditions and safety. They were soon joined by train drivers organised in ASLEF. And over the last week, 115,000 Royal Mail staff have taken action over pay and conditions, in what is the largest postal strike for decades. Elsewhere, Unite is involved in hundreds of disputes, involving over seventy thousand workers across various industries and workplaces. And CWU members at BT Openreach have joined the posties in struggle.
Britain’s Energy Catastrophe: Nationalise the Monopolies! Every day brings ever-worsening forecasts of disaster for ordinary people, as bills rise and vulnerable families are pushed into fuel poverty. Whilst millions freeze, energy bosses are raking in mega-profits. We say: expropriate the billionaires!
Health, Education 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!
Life Expectancy in US Drops for Second Straight Year Other wealthy nations haven’t seen the same dramatic decline, health experts note. Life expectancy in the United States has dropped for the second year in a row, a decline that is largely due to the coronavirus pandemic and the country’s inequitable health care system, experts say. Before the pandemic, the average life expectancy in the U.S. was 78 years and 10 months. In 2020, that number dropped to 77 years, and last year, it dropped to 76 years and one month. The last time the nation’s life expectancy was this low was more than two decades ago, in 1996. The current drop is the largest two-year decline in the U.S. in almost 100 years of tracking the data.