Recommended articles for Wednesday, December 19, 2018

• Report: U.S. To Leave Syria Immediately - Updated by Bernhard from Moon of Alabama. This news has been run by numerous other websites. (At 5 PM CT I've noticed that much of msm are framing it as "after the defeat of ISIS".)

• The working class and the environmental crisis by Patrick Martin from World Socialist Web Site. 

The inability of capitalism and the nation-state system to resolve the climate crisis was on display over the past two weeks in Katowice, Poland, the site of yet another UN-sponsored climate summit. The representatives of more than 200 governments, including 25,000 bureaucrats, scientists and diplomats, could not even agree to endorse a report on the looming dangers of global warming, let alone take any serious action to forestall it.

They adopted a meaningless rulebook to implement the Paris climate agreement, which climate scientists regard as completely inadequate.

• Burying the axe of war by Elijah J Magnier, a Kuwaiti independent journalist, from his blog. I much prefer the headline in the same post from Russia Insider: "Sudanese President Arrives in Syria Aboard Russian Plane as Mailman of the Saudis".

• The Fed Is Panicking by Naomi Prins from Daily Reckoning.

• The political fraud of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” by Will Morrow from World Socialist Web Site.

A socialist response to climate change cannot take place through the Democratic Party or within the framework of capitalism. It requires the organization of production according to a rational, scientific plan on a global scale. This requirement is fundamentally incompatible with both the private ownership of humanity’s productive forces (and the subordination of production according to the profit interests of the capitalist class), and the continued division of the world into rival national states, who compete on behalf of their own capitalist class for markets, profits and geostrategic control.