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After hearing, finally, about the resignation of the incredibly incompetent mis-educator Arne Duncan from the U.S. "Fuckup Education" Department, I now am having to entertain the idea that a whole group of fuckups took over the "progressive" label in politics in order to confuse the voters after they had promised their funders that they would never "ever" do anything in the least progressive.
US Condemned Over 'Horrific Bombing' of "Doctors Without Borders" Hospital in Afghanistan
By Sune Engel Rasmussen, Guardian UK
03 October 15
(http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/oct/03/aftermath-of-strike-that-killed-three-medecins-sans-frontieres-staff-video?CMP=embed_video)
Médecins Sans Frontières claims deadly airstrikes continued after alarm was raised with US and Afghan military
he United States has been condemned for allegedly launching a fatal airstrike on a Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) hospital in Afghanistan and continuing the bombardment after being informed of the damage by the charity.
At least nine doctors were killed and dozens more people were injured at the facility in the besieged city of Kunduz after it appeared to have been targeted in an aerial bombardment early on Saturday. MSF said large portions of the hospital were completely destroyed and it expected the death toll to rise.
It claimed GPS coordinates of the hospital had been widely circulated to all parties fighting in the conflict. It also alleged the bombing continued for up to 30 minutes after it raised the alarm with US and Afghan officials.
At the time of the bombing, 105 patients and their carers, and more than 80 MSF international and national staff were in the hospital. At least 37 staff members were wounded in the incident, it said. None of the international doctors volunteering at the facility were hurt.
The US, which has been involved in airstrikes in the country in an attempt to repel Taliban fighters, said a strike on Kunduz may have caused “collateral damage”.
An MSF spokesman said the organisation condemned “in the strongest possible terms the horrific bombing of its hospital in Kunduz full of staff and patients”.
A statement added: “MSF wishes to clarify that all parties to the conflict, including in Kabul and Washington, were clearly informed of the precise location (GPS coordinates) of the MSF facilities – hospital, guesthouse, office and an outreach stabilisation unit in Chardara (to the north-west of Kunduz).
“As MSF does in all conflict contexts, these precise locations were communicated to all parties on multiple occasions over the past months, including most recently on 29 September.
“The bombing continued for more than 30 minutes after American and Afghan military officials in Kabul and Washington were first informed. MSF urgently seeks clarity on exactly what took place and how this terrible event could have happened.”
Human Rights Watch said it had “grave concerns about whether US forces took sufficient precautions to identify and avoid striking the facility”.
Patricia Gossman, a senior researcher at the NGO, said: “The bombing of the hospital is a shocking development for Kunduz, where civilians and aid workers are already at grave risk from the fighting. All forces are obligated to do their utmost to avoid causing civilian harm.”
The group called for an impartial investigation to establish the circumstances of the attack, and urged the US to review its targeting procedures to ensure such incidents do not reoccur.
The US airstrikes come after days of fighting over the town.
Sarwar Husaini, a spokesman for Kunduz police, claimed Taliban fighters had entered the hospital compound on Friday evening and were firing at security forces from inside. MSF has not responded to the allegation.
An MSF staff member, who was on duty at the time, told the Guardian: “I was inside my office. Around 2am, the plane started bombing the main building of MSF. It lasted one and a half hours. After 3.30am, I came out from my office and saw all of the hospital was on fire.”
A spokesman for the US military confirmed a strike took place early on Saturday morning.
“US forces conducted an airstrike in Kunduz city at 2:15am [local time] on 3 October against individuals threatening the force. The strike may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility. This incident is under investigation,” said Col Brian Tribus, spokesman for international forces in Afghanistan.
Adil Akbar, a doctor at the trauma centre who was on duty at the time, told the Associated Press the operating theatre, emergency room and other parts of the hospital complex had been hit.
“I managed to escape after the attack but I know that most of the staff and even some of the patients are missing,” he said.
A relative of another doctor working at the hospital said his cousin had been killed in the strike. Nasratullah, 22, told the Guardian that Akbar, a 25-year-old not thought to be related to Adil, was in the Kunduz facility at the time. “He had been working in the hospital for a long time. He was a famous doctor,” he said.
Afghan special forces have been battling to retake the city with the help of international special forces advising on the ground, as well as US airstrikes. Since fighting broke out on Monday, MSF had treated 394 wounded people in Kunduz.
The Specter of Trump
A specter is haunting the Republican Party. Unlike in the 1980s, it’s not “communism” or the “Soviet threat.” Nor is it “radical Islam” or “terrorism.” It is Donald Trump, the self-described “self-made” billionaire — actually one of the most spectacularly unsuccessful businessmen in recent memory — who has emerged as the front-runner in the overcrowded race for the Republican presidential nomination.
Trump’s open xenophobia accounts for much of his popularity among the Republican base — predominantly suburban (and exurban) white middle-class professionals, managers, and small business people, and a minority of white workers. Eschewing what he terms political correctness, he decries the “rapists and criminals” supposedly streaming in from Mexico and calls for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
The approach resonates with a broad cross section of the white middle classes. In him they see the consummate anti-politician — a blunt-talking “man of the people” who speaks to their fears and anxieties and will restore America to greatness.
Trump’s ascendance has stoked panic among the Republican establishment, which is now trying to mobilize its resources to block a Trump nomination. It is bankrolling ads, for instance, that accuse Trump of being unelectable because of his “extremist views” and of being a “closet liberal” who once supported abortion rights and a national single-payer health insurance program.
The mainstream media has also latched on to Trump’s “extremism” and “electability,” claims which the Left should greet with some skepticism. After all, Ronald Reagan appeared to be well to the right of the mainstream of US politics in 1980s, and yet proved eminently electable.
On the Left, two writers — Harrison Fluss and Stanley Aronowitz — recently offered different takes on Trump. For Aronowitz, Trump exposes the role of big money in bourgeois politics. Trump “lets the cat out of the bag about something the political system has spent more than a century to disguise,” thereby undermining the legitimacy of representative democracy in America. Fluss, meanwhile, sees Trump as the “rotten fruit of the American ruling class” whose ideas are “no aberration from the mainstream” of conventional politics.
There are elements of truth in both interpretations. On the one hand, the ability of Trump and various Super PACs to spend unlimited amounts of money allows small, politically marginal groups of wealthy contributors to so obviously skew the electoral arena that it undermines faith in capitalist democracy.
On the other, unrestrained capitalist accumulation and competition have brought declining living standards and greater insecurity not only for most working people, but for segments of the middle classes. In the absence of a viable left or labor movement, the precarity that these groups face make them open to the appeals of right-wing demagogues like Trump.
However, neither analysis gets at what makes Trump’s candidacy both so appealing to layers of the white middle and working classes and so frightening to the Republican establishment. Put simply, Trump and Tea Party–aligned candidates like Ben Carson and Ted Cruz do not represent any segment of the capitalist class in the US.
While their hostility to unions and support for brutal austerity and lower corporate taxes coincide with the mainstream of capitalist opinion in the US, Tea Party Republicans in Congress have collided with capital over shutting down the federal government — endangering the credit of the state and capital — and on immigration.
In 2014, the Chamber of Commerce spent tens of millions to defeat Tea Party candidates in Republican congressional primaries across the country. Yet though many were vanquished in 2014, there were enough who returned to push out John Boehner (R-OH) as speaker of the House, upset at his opposition to using the federal debt ceiling as a bargaining chip to defund Planned Parenthood and slash funding for Medicare and Veterans’ pensions.
In the presidential race, it is likely that the Chamber of Commerce — which represents a broad cross-section of medium and large firms — and the Business Roundtable — which represents the largest, transnational corporations — will attempt to isolate Trump and the Tea Party candidates in favor of Jeb Bush. If that fails, many of the capitalists who support Bush today will be quite comfortable with the leading Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.
One reason is immigration — a very tricky question for capitalists in the US.
Clearly, they do not want masses of immigrants entering the US legally and quickly gaining citizenship rights. However, they are militantly opposed to mass deportations and other measures that would deprive them of a cheap and pliable workforce.
In 2010, the Chamber of Commerce joined the American Civil Liberties Union and the League of United Latin American Citizens in challenging Arizona’s anti-immigrant law (SB 1070), which drove thousands of immigrants to flee the state for fear of arrest and deportation.
In addition, the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce have been at the forefront of the push for immigration reform in Congress. Both want some combination of more “effective border protection,” a (long and difficult) “path to citizenship” for the US’s nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants, and a guest worker program for future immigrants that would provide US capital a supply of workers with no rights and no ability to become permanent residents or citizens.
The Trump boomlet is a repudiation of this agenda. Like the Tea Party, Trump is an example of radical middle-class politics. Caught between a disorganized working class and an increasingly rapacious capitalist class, segments of the middle classes — especially suburban whites in the US — feel insecure economically and socially. They see their livelihoods and social position threatened on all sides.
Unable to directly challenge capital, parts of the middle classes are drawn to a politics that scapegoats immigrants, unions, women, LGBT people, and people of color. The growing right-wing radicalization of the middle classes has fueled the expansion of right-wing formations and figures that are independent of the capitalist classes in a number of advanced capitalist societies: the UK Independence Party in Britain, the National Front in France, the Five Star Movement in Italy, and the Tea Party and Donald Trump in the US.
This radicalization of the middle classes — what Trotsky once referred to as “human dust” — bears some resemblance to the classic fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s. Genuine fascist elements (white supremacist groups with organized street fighting groups) have been attracted to the Tea Party and Trump.
However, neither the Tea Party nor Trump can be described as fascists. Both seek to win power through electoral politics, not abolish elections and representative government. Nor will capitalists in the US, in the foreseeable future, opt for such a far-right option. If the Republican establishment can’t stop Trump, they’ll likely cross partisan lines and support a neoliberal politician like Hillary Clinton.
The specter of Trump not only frightens the Republican establishment, but most of the US left. As it has time and time again since the 1930s, the threat of the far right will serve as an excuse for union officialdom and the liberal civil rights, feminist, and LGBTQ establishment to mobilize for Democrats.
But this solution to the rise of Trump and the far right is no solution at all: embracing “lesser evilism” in 2016 would mean yet again forgoing the work of rebuilding the labor and social movements and instead subordinating our radical politics to the Democratic Party. The disastrous result would be that the only visible opposition to the capitalist class would come not from the Left, but from a billionaire businessman.
Anyone else not seeing any jobs hiring anywhere?
At least it's not just me.
October 2, 2015
Today’s Payroll Jobs Report
Paul Craig Roberts
The 142,000 September payroll jobs reported today (2 Oct 2015) by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is too small to be consistent with the still high stock averages or the alleged economic recovery.
Moreover, the BLS says that it over-estimated the July and August payroll jobs by 59,000. The average workweek declined to 34.5 hours. The labor force participation rate fell further and is now the lowest in about 40 years. This is especially damning when we remember that in those long ago years many more households could exist as one-earner households.
The 5.1 percent reported unemployment rate is inconsistent with the collapse of the labor force participation rate and stands at 5.1 percent only because it includes not a single one of the millions of discouraged workers. The way BLS gets a low and comforting rate of unemployment is not to include most of the unemployed.
Where were the new jobs? If you can believe the numbers, despite the absence of retail sales growth, retail stores hired 23,700 new workers. Ambulatory health care services and hospitals hired 28,400, and 20,700 jobs were created for waitresses and bartenders. None of these jobs produce exportable goods and services.
My coauthor Dave Kranzler gives a good accounting of the shaky status of the economic part of the Matrix in which the public is kept by uninquisitive financial media. Here is Dave’s report:
http://investmentresearchdynamics.com/non-farm-payrolls-theres-not-enough-lipstick-in-the-world-to-pretty-up-this-pig/
If you have any interest in true prescientism, you can't get a better seer than Professor Noam Chomsky.
Don't bet against him.
Bernie Sanders Can’t Save America
Throughout his illustrious career, one of Noam Chomsky’s chief preoccupations has been questioning — and urging us to question — the assumptions and norms that govern our society.Following a talk on power, ideology, and US foreign policy last weekend at the New School in New York City, freelance Italian journalist Tommaso Segantini sat down with the eighty-six-year-old to discuss some of the same themes, including how they relate to processes of social change._ _ _ _ _ _ _
For radicals, progress requires puncturing the bubble of inevitability: austerity, for instance, “is a policy decision undertaken by the designers for their own purposes.” It is not implemented, Chomsky says, “because of any economic laws.” American capitalism also benefits from ideological obfuscation: despite its association with free markets, capitalism is shot through with subsidies for some of the most powerful private actors. This bubble needs popping too.
In addition to discussing the prospects for radical change, Chomsky comments on the eurozone crisis, whether Syriza could’ve avoided submitting to Greece’s creditors, and the significance of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.
And he remains soberly optimistic. “Over time there’s a kind of a general trajectory towards a more just society, with regressions and reversals of course.”
In an interview a couple of years ago, you said that the Occupy Wall Street movement had created a rare sentiment of solidarity in the US. September 17 was the fourth anniversary of the OWS movement. What is your evaluation of social movements such as OWS over the last twenty years? Have they been effective in bringing about change? How could they improve?
They’ve had an impact; they have not coalesced into persistent and ongoing movements. It’s a very atomized society. There are very few continuing organizations which have institutional memory, that know how to move to the next step and so on.
This is partly due to the destruction of the labor movement, which used to offer a kind of fixed basis for many activities; by now, practically the only persistent institutions are the churches. So many things are church-based.
It’s hard for a movement to take hold. There are often movements of young people, which tend to be transitory; on the other hand there’s a cumulative effect, and you never know when something will spark into a major movement. It’s happened time and again: civil rights movement, women’s movement. So keep trying until something takes off.
The 2008 crisis clearly demonstrated the flaws of the neoliberal economic doctrine. Nevertheless, neoliberalism still seems to persist and its principles are still applied in many countries. Why, even with the tragic effects of the 2008 crisis, does the neoliberal doctrine appear to be so resilient? Why hasn’t there yet been a strong response like after the Great Depression?
First of all, the European responses have been much worse than the US responses, which is quite surprising. In the US there were mild efforts at stimulus, quantitative easing and so on, which slowly allowed the economy to recover.
In fact, recovery from the Great Depression was actually faster in many countries than it is today, for a lot of reasons. In the case of Europe, one of the main reasons is that the establishment of a single currency was a built-in disaster, like many people pointed out. Mechanisms to respond to the crisis are not available in the EU: Greece, for example, can’t devalue its currency.
The integration of Europe had very positive developments in some respects and was harmful in others, especially when it is under the control of extremely reactionary economic powers, imposing policies which are economically destructive and that are basically a form of class war.
Why is there no reaction? Well, the weak countries are not getting support from others. If Greece had had support from Spain, Portugal, Italy, and other countries they might have been able to resist the eurocrat forces. These are kind of special cases having to do with contemporary developments. In the 1930s, remember the responses were not particularly attractive: one of them was Nazism.
Several months ago Alexis Tsipras, leader of Syriza, was elected as Greece’s prime minister. In the end, however, he had to make many compromises due to the pressure imposed on him by financial powers, and was forced to implement harsh austerity measures.
Do you think that, in general, genuine change can come when a radical leftist leader like Tsipras comes to power, or have nation states lost too much sovereignty and are they too dependent on financial institutions that can discipline them if they don’t follow the rules of the free market?
As I said, in the case of Greece, if there had been popular support for Greece from other parts of Europe, Greece might have been able to withstand the assault of the eurocrat bank alliance. But Greece was alone — it did not have many options.
There are very good economists such as Joseph Stiglitz who think Greece should have just pulled out of the eurozone. It’s a very risky step. Greece is a very small economy, it’s not much of an export economy, and it would be too weak to withstand external pressures.
There are people who criticize the Syriza tactics and the stand that they took, but I think it’s hard to see what options they had with the lack of external support.
Let’s imagine for example that Bernie Sanders won the 2016 presidential elections. What do you think would happen? Could he bring radical change in the structures of power of the capitalist system?
Suppose that Sanders won, which is pretty unlikely in a system of bought elections. He would be alone: he doesn’t have congressional representatives, he doesn’t have governors, he doesn’t have support in the bureaucracy, he doesn’t have state legislators; and standing alone in this system, he couldn’t do very much. A real political alternative would be across the board, not just a figure in the White House.
It would have to be a broad political movement. In fact, the Sanders campaign I think is valuable — it’s opening up issues, it’s maybe pressing the mainstream Democrats a little bit in a progressive direction, and it is mobilizing a lot of popular forces, and the most positive outcome would be if they remain after the election.
It’s a serious mistake to just to be geared to the quadrennial electoral extravaganza and then go home. That’s not the way changes take place. The mobilization could lead to a continuing popular organization which could maybe have an effect in the long run.
What is your opinion on the emergence of figures such as Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Pablo Iglesias in Spain, or Bernie Sanders in the US? Is a new left movement on the rise, or are these just sporadic responses to the economic crisis?
It depends what the popular reaction is. Take Corbyn in England: he’s under fierce attack, and not only from the Conservative establishment, but even from the Labour establishment. Hopefully Corbyn will be able to withstand that kind of attack; that depends on popular support. If the public is willing to back him in the face of the defamation and destructive tactics, then it can have an impact. Same with Podemos in Spain.
How can one mobilize a large number of people on such complex issues?
It’s not that complex. The task of organizers and activists is to help people understand and to make them recognize that they have power, that they’re not powerless. People feel impotent, but that has to be overcome. That’s what organizing and activism is all about.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but there aren’t any secrets. It’s a long-term process — it has always been the case. And it’s had successes. Over time there’s a kind of a general trajectory towards a more just society, with regressions and reversals of course.
So would you say that, during your lifetime, humanity has progressed in the construction of a somewhat more just society?
There have been enormous changes. Just look here at MIT. Take a walk down the hall and take a look at the nature of the student body: it’s about half women, a third minorities, informally dressed, casual relations among people and so on. When I got here in 1955, if you’d walk down the same hall it would have been white males, jackets and ties, very polite, obedient, not posing many questions. That’s a huge change.
And it’s not just here — it’s all over the place. You and I wouldn’t have looked like this, and in fact you probably wouldn’t be here. Those are some of the cultural and social changes that have taken place thanks to committed and dedicated activism.
Other things have not, like the labor movement, which has been under severe attack all throughout American history and particularly since the early 1950s. It has been seriously weakened: in the private sector it’s marginal, and it’s now being attacked in the public sector. That’s a regression.
The neoliberal policies are certainly a regression. For the majority of the population in the US, there’s been pretty much stagnation and decline in the last generation. And not because of any economic laws. These are policies. Just as austerity in Europe is not an economic necessity — in fact, it’s economic nonsense. But it’s a policy decision undertaken by the designers for their own purposes. I think basically it’s a kind of class war, and it can be resisted, but it’s not easy. History doesn’t go in a straight line.
How do you think that the capitalist system will survive, considering its dependence on fossil fuels and its impact on the environment?
What’s called the capitalist system is very far from any model of capitalism or market. Take the fossil fuels industries: there was a recent study by the IMF which tried to estimate the subsidy that energy corporations get from governments. The total was colossal. I think it was around $5 trillion annually. That’s got nothing to do with markets and capitalism.
And the same is true of other components of the so-called capitalist system. By now, in the US and other Western countries, there’s been, during the neoliberal period, a sharp increase in the financialization of the economy. Financial institutions in the US had about 40 percent of corporate profits on the eve of the 2008 collapse, for which they had a large share of responsibility.
There’s another IMF study that investigated the profits of American banks, and it found that they were almost entirely dependent on implicit public subsidies. There’s a kind of a guarantee — it’s not on paper, but it’s an implicit guarantee — that if they get into trouble they will be bailed out. That’s called too-big-to-fail.
And the credit rating agencies of course know that, they take that into account, and with high credit ratings financial institutions get privileged access to cheaper credit, they get subsidies if things go wrong and many other incentives, which effectively amounts to perhaps their total profit. The business press tried to make an estimate of this number and guessed about $80 billion a year. That’s got nothing to do with capitalism.
It’s the same in many other sectors of the economy. So the real question is, will this system of state capitalism, which is what it is, survive the continued use of fossil fuels? And the answer to that is, of course, no.
By now, there’s a pretty strong consensus among scientists who say that a large majority of the remaining fossil fuels, maybe 80 percent, have to be left in the ground if we hope to avoid a temperature rise which would be pretty lethal. And it is not happening. Humans may be destroying their chances for decent survival. It won’t kill everybody, but it would change the world dramatically.
In a recent interview published in "Jacobin," Noam Chomsky predicts what he thinks would happen if Bernie Sanders won the 2016 presidential election, as well as comments on on the rise of progressive political parties and figures such as Greece’s Syriza and the U.K.‘s Jeremy Corbyn.
From "Jacobin:"
Suppose that Sanders won, which is pretty unlikely in a system of bought elections. He would be alone: he doesn’t have congressional representatives, he doesn’t have governors, he doesn’t have support in the bureaucracy, he doesn’t have state legislators; and standing alone in this system, he couldn’t do very much. A real political alternative would be across the board, not just a figure in the White House.
It would have to be a broad political movement. In fact, the Sanders campaign I think is valuable — it’s opening up issues, it’s maybe pressing the mainstream Democrats a little bit in a progressive direction, and it is mobilizing a lot of popular forces, and the most positive outcome would be if they remain after the election.
It’s a serious mistake to just to be geared to the quadrennial electoral extravaganza and then go home. That’s not the way changes take place. The mobilization could lead to a continuing popular organization which could maybe have an effect in the long run.
What is your opinion on the emergence of figures such as Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Pablo Iglesias in Spain, or Bernie Sanders in the US? Is a new left movement on the rise, or are these just sporadic responses to the economic crisis?
It depends what the popular reaction is. Take Corbyn in England: he’s under fierce attack, and not only from the Conservative establishment, but even from the Labour establishment. Hopefully Corbyn will be able to withstand that kind of attack; that depends on popular support. If the public is willing to back him in the face of the defamation and destructive tactics, then it can have an impact. Same with Podemos in Spain.
Wells Fargo's Master Spin Job
By Matt Taibbi, "Rolling Stone"
03 October 15
If you still don't believe our brethren on Wall Street have planet-sized cojones, check out this story.
All over the country, Wells Fargo is making headlines for launching a multimillion-dollar homeowner assistance program called HomeLIFT, which among other things offers $15,000 down payment grants to prospective home-buyers.
Local mayors in big cities from one end of the country to the other are showing up at ribbon-cuttings and throwing rose petals at the bank for its generosity. Newspapers in turn are running breathless profiles of the low-income homeowners who will now get to buy dream homes thanks to the bank's beneficence.
Some knew, some didn't, but all are leaving out one key detail: Wells Fargo was forced to launch HomeLIFT.
To understand the background, we have to go back to July 25th of last year, when a federal judge in the Northern District of California approved a settlement in a case called City of Westland Police and Fire Retirement System v. Stumpf. The suit was brought on behalf of shareholders by Robbins Geller, the same firm featured in a story I wrote two years ago about the ratings agencies.
For those who are fortunate enough to have forgotten, robo-signing was a common practice that devastated families during the foreclosure crisis. People all over the country found themselves booted out of their homes thanks to bogus affidavits signed by "vice presidents" and "regional managers," who were often scraggly kids just out of college blindly signing hundreds of documents a day, if not more.
It was a kind of systematic perjury, and most of the major banks eventually copped to doing it.
Wells Fargo was one of those banks, joining JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Ally Financial, Citigroup and others in a sweeping $25 billion settlement with state and federal regulators finalized in 2012.
So they did have standing to be sued.
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