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During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three Point Political Program: 1. Austerity, 2. Scapegoating Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal Immigrants’ for Unemployment, and 3. The Iron Heel.
Democracy?: As the Capitalist Robber Barons Steal from the 99% — Only the 1% Voted For Austerity — The 99% Should Decide On Austerity — Not Just Those Who Profit From Austerity! Under Austerity, All of the World Will Eventually Be Pauperized, Humbled, and Desecrated Like Greece and Puerto Rico!
Image of the Day:
Bendib: Help Is on the Way!: The president hears your anguished cries for help, billionaires (not you, Puerto Rico).
Quote of the Day:
Corbyn suggested appealing to the UN to organise conflict resolution. But the UN is completely impotent, depending as it does for all its power on the imperialist powers of the world. When the US wanted to invade Iraq, it ignored the UN and the UN could do nothing. And Saudi Arabia currently chairs the UN Human Rights Council, and in April of this year the UN elected Saudi Arabia to serve on the UN Commission on the Status of Women, a body “dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women.” It should be clear, therefore, that we cannot use the UN to spread peace and internationalism throughout the world. Who would a Corbyn government be able to cooperate with to bring about peace and global justice? Who could it put its faith in? Only the international working class. Just as in Britain, the only people Corbyn has been able to rely upon to elect him, to defend him and to fight for socialist ideas, have been the youth and the working class, so too internationally, the only organisations we can expect to fight for peace, for solidarity, and against racism, terrorism and exploitation, are the workers’ organisations and sister organisations of our trade unions. Workers’ solidarity is the basis of socialist internationalism. — Realise Corbyn’s speech – fight for socialism! — With his speech to the 2017 Labour conference, Corbyn has transformed the political landscape once again. All socialists must not only fight for this programme, but also extend and deepen it, so that we can transform society forever by ending the anarchy, poverty and injustice of capitalism. — How do we make Corbyn’s speech a reality?
Videos of the Day:
Trump Plans to Decertify Iran Nuclear Deal Before decertifying the Iran nuclear deal, the US should approach the UN Security Council and the P5+1 with evidence that Iran is not in compliance, this is a multilateral deal says Professor Vijay Prashad
U.S.:
US Bomb Tests and Bidding Wars Herald New (Unlawful) $1.5 Trillion Nuclear Weapons Complex While much of the world pursues the abolition of nuclear weapons — embraced by the adoption July 7 by 122 nations of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons — the militarized Trump White House is pursuing plans for a trillion-dollar rebuild of the entire US nuclear weapons complex. The enormous, extravagant program is designed to produce 80 new nuclear warheads every year, including three new warhead types, a new $20 billion nuclear-armed Long Range Standoff (LRSO) weapon, a new $12 billion B61 nuclear gravity bomb, a new fleet of nuclear-armed submarines, and a new $100 billion intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system.. by John Laforge
The Ever More Orwellian Definition of Terrorism In terms of twisting the English language into a ludicrous Orwellian mockery of itself in order to short circuit critical thinking, this has been a particularly good week. My favorite part so far has been the part where respectable leftists writers have been arguing that the already arbitrary application of the label “terrorist” should now be rendered even more arbitrary. I’m not talking about establishment liberals in corporatist papers like The New York Times. I’m talking writers who I generally respect, and fearless, adversarial outlets like The Intercept and CounterPunch. by CJ Hopkins
How Big Corporations Game Our Democracy Into Their Plutocracy A major chapter in American history – rarely taught in our schools – is how ever larger corporations have moved to game, neutralize and undermine the people’s continual efforts to protect our touted democratic society. It is a fascinating story of the relentless exercise of power conceived or seized by corporations, with the strategic guidance of corporate lawyers. by Ralph Nader
“Sonic Attacks” in Cuba: Who Benefits? Consider this. The United States government doesn’t know who’s responsible for the so-called acoustic attacks on its embassy personnel in Havana. Then consider this. Cuban president Raúl Castro didn’t simply claim his government had nothing to do with the incidents, he did the unthinkable and invited the FBI to investigate. FBI agents haven’t been able to figure it out. Neither have American acoustics specialists or medical experts. Even Canada’s Mounties, whose own diplomats reported similar attacks, are stymied. Despite the fact no one has identified either culprit or cause, the Trump administration is pre-emptively creating conflict with Havana. hy? And who benefits from that? By John Kirk – Stephen Kimber
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
The FBI’s New U.S. Terrorist Threat: ‘Black Identity Extremists’ Law enforcement calls it a violent movement. Critics call it racist. By Jana Winter and Sharon Weinberger 
Las Vegas: How White Rights, Neoliberal Isolation and a Little Incompetence Killed 59 or 60 People This Week Gun rights in the US are mainly white rights. It’s always been that way, sort of baked into the North American experience. The “well regulated militia” to which the Second Amendment to the US Constitution refers were a creation of colonial North America, as I explained back in July 2008, “Colonial America and the early US was a very unequal place. All the good, cleared, level agricultural land with easy access to transport was owned by a very few, very wealthy white men. Many poor whites were brought over as indentured servants, but once they’d completed their periods of forced labor, allowing them to hang around the towns and cities landless and unemployed was dangerous to the social order. So they were given guns and credit, and sent inland to make their own fortunes by encroaching upon the orchards, farms and hunting grounds of Native Americans, who had little or no access to firearms. The law, of course did not penalize white men who robbed, raped or killed Indians. At regular intervals, colonial governors and local US officials would muster the free armed white men as militia, and dispatch them in murderous punitive raids to make the frontier safer for settlers and land speculators.” By Bruce A. Dixon, Black Agenda Report managing editor
Environment:
The FBI’s Hunt for Two Missing Piglets Reveals the Federal Cover-Up of Barbaric Factory FarmsFBI agents are devoting substantial resources to a multistate hunt for two baby piglets that the bureau believes are named Lucy and Ethel. The two piglets were removed over the summer from the Circle Four Farm in Utah by animal rights activists who had entered the Smithfield Foods-owned factory farm to film the brutal, torturous conditions in which the pigs are bred in order to be slaughtered.While filming the conditions at the Smithfield facility, activists saw the two ailing baby piglets laying on the ground, visibly ill and near death, surrounded by the rotting corpses of dead piglets. By Glenn Greenwald
Appetite for Destruction: Trump’s War on the Environment From the senseless slaughter in Las Vegas to the horrific impacts of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico, to Trump’s boisterous threats against North Kore and unfolding strife within the White House — it’s easy to get lost in the world’s madness and the nefarious mind of Prez Trump. It’s a dangerous vortex, no doubt, but Trump’s twitter storm and paper towel tossing photo ops are little more than a distraction from his administration’s unfettered assault on the environment. This past week, Team Trump quietly denied protection for 25 species that are on the verge of extinction, including the Pacific walrus and black-backed woodpecker. The reason, of course, is that science doesn’t mean jack shit to the corporate barons ruling our government. by Joshua Frank
Lake Okeechobee hits highest level since 2005, raising concerns its dike could fail. Rainfall from Hurricane Irma has pushed the water level in Lake Okeechobee to its highest point since 2005. Now, with more wet weather in the forecast, nearby residents fear a collapse of the 80-year-old dike around the lake. As a result, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is dumping large volumes of lake water out into coastal estuaries — exactly as it did last year, when those releases caused a massive toxic algae bloom that closed Atlantic coast beaches over the Fourth of July weekend. By Craig Pittman
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Labor:
Economy:
Real Average Weekly Earnings (Benchmark Revised) Production and Nonsupervisory Employees Deflated by CPI-W versus ShadowStats-Alternate (1990-Base) 1965 to August 2017, Seasonally-Adjusted [ShadowStats, BLS]
Shadow Government Statistics Real Unemployment Rate: Above 20%: 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.
Figures Don’t Lie, But Liars Can ‘Figure’: Here’s How the Unemployment Rate Dropped Last Month While U.S. Lost 33,000 Jobs This morning’s September jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not actually capture the extent of the economic misery in the U.S. mainland last month. The data showed a stunning loss of 33,000 jobs (the first time the U.S. has had a negative figure since 2010) while simultaneously reporting that the unemployment rate dipped to 4.2 percent from 4.4 percent in August. But here’s the quirky thing about how the U.S. government’s counts people as being employed: according to the official web site of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, an individual can be counted as employed even if they didn’t receive a dime in salary during the week the data is collected. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
World:
How do we make Corbyn’s speech a reality? Daniel Morley discusses the bold measures needed to ensure that the policies outlined in Corbyn’s recent speech to Labour conference are realised in practice. Like the Labour Party manifesto at the most recent general election, Corbyn’s closing speech to the Labour conference last week has electrified the party, his supporters, and the Left in general by pushing the tone and policies significantly further to the left. 
Spain: Catalonia grinds to a halt in protest at police repression of independence referendum Catalonia’s Independence Referendum on October 1 has opened up a major regime crisis in Spain. Braving brutal police repression, hundreds of thousands occupied and defended polling stations so that 2.2 million people could vote on the day. There were images of police officers using hammers to break through the doors of polling stations and then snatching polling boxes from the hands of the people, of police officers using batons against unarmed civilians, including elderly ladies, of police officers throwing people downstairs. By Jorge Martin 
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
The Corporate Assault on Science The fact that science is the foundation for civilization and democracy should be self-evident. Regrettably that connection seems often to escape our collective consciousness. We tend to think of science narrowly as restricted to hi-tech, laboratories and the development of electric cars or travel to Mars. But everything we do collectively from Medicare to fighting climate change to designing social programs, building infrastructure and tax policy we take for granted is rooted in evidence, that is, science. by Murray Dobbin