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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!
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Quotes of the Day:
Despite Donald Trump’s glowing assessment of his administration’s recovery effort in Puerto Rico, the U.S. territory is still in the throes of a major humanitarian crisis wrought by Hurricane Maria. Clean water remains in short supply, and nearly 80 percent of the island is still without power. To make matters worse, the commonwealth is in such a perilous financial situation that it is expected to run out of cash by the end of October. Despite all that, The Washington Post reports that the territory’s state-owned electrical utility awarded a two-year-old company from Montana, which at the time of the hurricane had only two full-time employees, a $300 million contract to restore its electrical grid. Even more curiously, the company, Whitefish Energy, is based in the hometown of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who knows the owner, Andy Techmanski, and whose son worked a summer job at one of Techmanski’s construction sites. — Ryan Zinke’s Neighbor Lands $300 Million Contract to Fix Puerto Rico’s Power Grid
According to the contract, the government is not allowed to audit or conduct oversight over Whitefish to see how taxpayer money is being spent or where it is going. The energy company is owned by Trump donors who have connections to Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and Trump Energy Secretary Rick Perry. Whitefish only has two full-time employees and it not prepared to handle a contract of this size. Whitefish is going to make a hefty sum off of US taxpayers for hiring subcontractors to do the real work in Puerto Rico. Trump Has A New Massive Scandal As FEMA Says They Never Approved Whitefish Energy Contract
Videos of the Day:
IMF Worried that High Inequality Could Threaten Global Capitalism All income growth of the past few years is going to the top 10 percent, without paying more in taxes. IMF says that higher taxation of the top earners would not impinge on economic growth, explains economist Michael Roberts
Democrats Funded the Steele Dossier that Fueled Russiagate After months of obfuscation, the Washington Post reveals that the Clinton campaign and the DNC funded the infamous Steele dossier at the heart of Russiagate. Empty Wheel’s Marcy Wheeler and TRNN’s Aaron Mate discuss
U.S.:
Congressmen have made it their right to harass and ‘crouch grab’ women or even rape women legal!:
Congress has its own set of rules for sexual misconduct, The Washington Post reports. The unique code of conduct stems from a 1955 decision by Congress to enact a multi-step process for sexual harassment complaints that is not used anywhere else in the federal government, the Post explained, nor in most areas of the private sector. Per Congress’ rules, a claimant has 180 days after the alleged incident to file a complaint with the Office of Compliance. This requires the accuser to call the office to obtain a special password to access the complaint form. After filing, the claimant spends one month in counseling and another in a mediation phase. The process is confidential for both the accuser and the accused, and an entire congressional office has been devoted to ensuring that cases are not handled in the courts. If the mediation reaches a settlement, that money does not come from the office of the accused. Instead, the money flows from a special U.S. Treasury fund. Between 1997 and 2014 the U.S. Treasury fund paid for 235 workplace violation settlements for a sum total of $15.2 million, the Post reports. Those figures do not detail the nature of the violations. — The U.S. Treasury has a special fund for congressional sexual harassment settlements
With Funding for Domestic Violence Survivors Under Threat, Grassroots Groups Step In The proposed 2018 federal budget would cut funding for legal protections and safety nets for survivors of domestic and sexual violence by 93 percent over 10 years. But some of the now-threatened policies were already failing survivors marginalized by race, class, immigration status and sexual/gender identity, say grassroots groups who continue to mobilize on behalf of criminalized survivors. By Victoria Law
Rep. Tom Marino: Drug czar nominee and the opioid industry’s advocate in Congress Tom Marino is a four-term Republican member of the House who represents a district in northeastern Pennsylvania that has been hard-hit by the opioid crisis. Yet Marino also has been a friend on Capitol Hill of the giant drug companies that distribute the pain pills that have wreaked so much devastation around the nation. Marino was the chief advocate of the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act, which requires the government to meet a higher bar before taking certain enforcement actions. By Scott Higham and Lenny Bernstein
Opioid Plan Called ‘Band-Aid on Gunshot Wound’: Trump’s New and Unimproved War on Drugs Predicted to Fail President’s remarks on opioid epidemic little more than a collection of Reagan-era “just say no” talking points by Jake Johnson, staff writer
How big pharma’s money – and its politicians – feed the US opioid crisis Tom Marino might have withdrawn from consideration as Trump’s drug czar, but drug money is coursing through the veins of Congress — contributing directly to an epidemic that kills thousands of Americans each year By Chris McGreal
Big Pharma Execs Bribed Doctors to Prescribe More Opioids Amid National Crisis, Feds Say The CEO of drug giant Insys Therapeutics bribed doctors to prescribe more opioids to patients who didn’t even need them, according to federal authorities who arrested the executive after a raid on Thursday — a major offensive in the battle against America’s opioid epidemic. By Melina Delkic
Environment:
Trump Silent As Enormous Chemical Fire In West Virginia Rages For A Fourth Day Yesterday, Justice asked the federal government For assistance, resources, and advice to fight a massive chemically-fed fire at an old 420,000-square-foot power plant and tool factory filled with scrap plastic which has been burning in Parkersburg since it erupted on Saturday. By Benjamin Locke
Rolling Back the Tide of Pesticide Poison, Corruption and Looming Mass Extinction An anthropogenic mass extinction is underway that will affect all life on the planet and humans will struggle to survive the phenomenon. So claims Dr Rosemary Mason in a paper (2015) in the Journal of Biological Physics and Chemistry. Loss of biodiversity is the most urgent of the environmental problems because this type of diversity is critical to ecosystem services and human health. Mason argues that the modern chemical-intensive industrialised system of food and agriculture is the main culprit. by Colin Todhunter
Study finds 500% rise in weedkiller in human urine A study showing a 500 percent rise in human exposure to glyphosate proves people ingest it when eating Roundup-sprayed crops, the lead researcher says. By Alexa Cook
Ongoing Big Energy Crisis:
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Labor:
New reports document declining life expectancy and worsening health of US workers
Cancer and Blue-Collar Workers — Who Cares? (1995) Editor’s Note: This paper was presented before the President’s Cancer Panel meeting on “Lung Cancer: Societal and It is reported that the National Cancer Institute (NCD Clinical Implications” last October 5 at Tysons Corner, Virginia. This article by Peter Infante is a cogent summary of recent information on the number of workers ex- posed to carcinogens in the U.S. and the inadequacy or incompleteness of current regulations. Dr. Infante has been a leader for many years in pointing out the risks of cancer and other serious diseases borne by workers, and he made this recent eloquent presentation to the President’s Cancer Panel last October. It is noteworthy that he estimated a considerable ongoing excess risk of death from lung cancer associated with a new Permissible Exposure Limit for cadmium; this is because of the “technological/economic feasibility” constraint on setting OSHA standards. This is one type of constraint that worker health and safety advocates will have to continue to battle in the coming years. . . . By Peter F. Infante
Economy:
Shadow Government Statistics “Corrected” Real GDP Index (2000 -02017), First-Estimate of Third- Quarter 2017
UK economy: running on empty Just when Theresa May and the Tories would have been hoping for some respite after a dismal conference period, the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) has sent a shockwave through British political and business circles. In its annual “Forecast Evaluation Report” (FER), published this month, the OBR downgraded the UK’s economic outlook, having revealed that both GDP and productivity growth had consistently fallen short of OBR predictions over the last two years. By Josh Holroyd
World:
Nurses returning from Puerto Rico accuse the federal government of leaving people to die” We cannot be silent while millions of people continue to endure these conditions.” The nation’s largest nurses union condemned the federal government’s emergency response in Puerto Rico on Thursday for “delaying necessary humanitarian aide to its own citizens and leaving them to die.” by Alexia Fernández Campbell
The Devastation of Puerto Rico The death toll is not yet confirmed. It is hard to know what is happening since the roads in the interior of the island remain impassable and communications networks are down.Three weeks after Hurricane Maria left the island, the 3.4 million Puerto Ricans remain in the dark. It is estimated that 85 per cent of the population will not get power for at least six months and that 40 per cent of the islanders will not have access to drinking water. Waterborne diseases threaten the people, whose health has been further endangered by the threadbare hospitals. by Vijay Prashad
Niger, Niger Burning Bright Nobody knows anything. Trump can’t recall the names of the slain soldiers. Mad Dog Mattis can’t explain what the soldiers were doing when they were killed. Lindsay Graham and Chuck Schumer had no idea the US had 800 boots on the ground in Niger, even though they had both repeatedly voted to appropriate money for Africom’s operations in the Lake Chad Basin and in the Saharan Region, allegedly to target ISIS and Boko Haram. by Jeffrey St. Clair 
Health, Science, Education, and Welfare:
From Lead Levels Below EPA Limits Can Still Impact Your Health: That’s, in part, because the EPA action level – 15 parts per billion of lead in the water – is not a threshold for public health, so a reading below that number doesn’t mean the water is safe. Public officials and school administrators often reference that level to assuage fears about lead in the water. But Jeff Cohen, who was on the EPA team that decided on that number, said linking it to a threshold for public health is a “misunderstanding.” “The goal of the rule is zero lead in drinking water,” he said. The EPA’s action level isn’t based on medical research. No amount of lead is known to be safe. “It was never designed to identify a safe level of lead in drinking water,” Cohen told NPR. He said the number was simply what water utilities told the EPA they could manage with treatment back in the late 1980s, when the EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule was drafted. “It was based on the little data available at that time, from water utilities in the U.S. that had installed different levels of corrosion control treatment,” he said:
3 San Francisco public schools show high levels of lead in water. By Jill Tucker (When I was a Business Agent for San Francisco Painters Local 4 (1994 t0 1997), The work under the Municipal Bond to do lead abatement in the San Francisco, not lead removal, for the SF public schools, the requiremens for lead abatement were not fully enforced. I tried to enforced these requirement, but the San Francisco Public School bureaucrats refused to enforce the regulations! This was a part of the Rojas Scandle. Therefore, I am not surprised by this article. — Roland Sheppard)
Since the U.S, Invaded Afghanistan, the Opium production in Afghanistan goes into more than 90% of heroin worldwide.