Daily News Digest June 28, 2021

Daily News Digest June 28, 2021

Daily News Digest Archives

Images Of the Day:

The Biggest ‘Big Lie’: As the Rober Baron Government Robs Social Security Funds, The Republicrats Claim That the Social Security Fund ‘Will Go Broke’! Our Pensions are un Daamger Because of the 1%’s Plundering! The Robber Barons of the 1880s Pale in Comparison to Todays Roberr Barrons!

Social Security ‘Debt’

Robber Baron Government: Congress Robbed Social Security And Doesn’t Want To Pay It BackAnother Example of Capitalism as a Failed System: World CaAnpilalism Was Aware of the Danger of Cornovavirus Threat Over 5 Years 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!
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”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:

Sea level rise due to climate change eyed as contributing factor in Miami-area building collapse David Knowles David Knowles·Senior Editor Sat, June 26, 2021, 12:21 AM·3 min read As the search for survivors of the collapse of a 12-story beachfront condominium in Surfside, Fla., continued on Friday, building experts began looking at the possibility that sea level rise caused by climate change may have contributed to the disaster that has left at least four people dead and 159 missing. From a geological standpoint, the base of South Florida’s barrier islands is porous limestone. As the oceans encroach on land due to sea level rise and the worsening of so-called king tides, groundwater is pushed up through the limestone, causing flooding. That brackish water, which regularly inundates underground parking garages in South Florida, can potentially lead to the deterioration of building foundations over time. — The Danger Of Limestone Foundations Are Known … Sea Level Rise Due to Climate Change Eyed as Contributing Factor in Miami-Area Building Collapse

United States’s Private Secret/Semisecret — Legal/Extra-Legal— Semi-Regulated Military Armies/Contractors      From: Private Military Contractors and U.S. Grand Strategy;  The difficulty in obtaining adequate information to judge the cost and efficiency of PMCs stems from several sources. Because many PMC sell their services through the Foreign Military Sales program they should be regulated through the U.S. export control regime, under the jurisdiction of the Arms Export Control Act. While the AECA stipulates that the names of the client countries and the types of defense articles or services involved “shall not be withheld from public disclosure unless the President determines that the release of such information would be contrary to the national interest,” the State Department interpreted this narrowly, and in May 2002 the Justice Department issued new guidelines that allow companies to challenge the release of information to the public under the Freedom of Information Act.43 This lack of transparency and oversight makes it virtually impossible for the public to assess the practice of private military contracting.  . . . . A regulatory framework that guaranteed adequate executive supervision and congressional oversight would be an improvement. But the level of review and inquiry that either branch gives to licensing decisions under the AECA is unclear.  In short, despite ongoing or planned corrective actions, the contracting system for PMC remains deeply troubled. On June 10, 2009, the congressionally established Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan issued its interim report. It found that “a critical shortage of qualified contract-management personnel in theater and those that are there are stretched too thin. In particular, the process for designating and training contracting officer’s representatives to check contractor performance in theater is broken.” 54 With respect to management and accountability issues the commission found that: • Neither the military nor the federal civilian acquisition workforces have expanded to keep pace with recent years’ enormous growth in the number and value of contingency contracts. • Contract auditors are not employed effectively in contingency contracting [and that]

Videos of the Day:

As Biden Pledges Police Funding to Curb Gun Violence, Activists Call for Community Investment

Afghan President Ghani Visits White House as His Government Nears Collapse

A Big Fight In Small-Town Wisconsin Residents of three rural counties in Western Wisconsin are fighting the construction of two factory hog farms that will do irreparable damage to their communities. Throughout July, we will be covering their struggleUnited 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 ownershipof the Reublicrats, who profit from war and the war budget, voted 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 the poor and gives to the Rich.  Tax the Rich!  — They Can Afford To Pay!

Who Owns the US National Debt? The Biggest Owner Is Not Foreign Entities, but U.S. Taxpayers Which agencies own the most Treasuries? Social Security, by a long shot. The U.S. Treasury publishes this in the Monthly Treasury Statement. Here’s the breakdown from the February 2021 data:

• Social Security trusts, including the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Federal Disability Insurance Trust Funds: $2.90 trillio

• Office of Personnel Management Retirement: $955.1 billion
• Military Retirement Fund: $1.01 trillion. This has become a big issue in funding our nation’s defense and is only expected to grow.
• Medicare, which includes the Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Fund: $304.4 billion

• Cash on hand to fund federal government operations: $723 billion²

Poll Finds Socialism Increasingly Seen as ‘Badge of Pride’ in US Two-thirds of U.S. adults want the federal government to implement policies to reduce the worsening gap between rich and poor. While a majority of U.S. adults still have more positive than negative perceptions of capitalism, less than half of the country’s 18 to 34-year-olds view the profit-maximizing market system favorably, and the attractiveness of socialism continues to increase among people over 35, according to a new poll released Friday. By Kenny Stancil

Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal Could Cut Unemployment Benefits, Experts Warn

The bipartisan infrastructure deal that President Joe Biden touted in front of the White House on Thursday contains a proposed funding mechanism that experts fear could unjustly strip unemployment benefits from jobless workers under the guise of combating fraud.A White House fact sheet on the new agreement lists “unemployment insurance program integrity” as one of the $579 billion plan’s pay-fors, alongside other funding sources that critics say amount to an infrastructure privatization scheme. The bipartisan group of senators that struck the deal with Biden reportedly believes $80 billion in revenue can be derived from a crackdown on unemployment fraud. By Jake Johnston 

Differed Maintenance Kills: Before Florida Building Collapse, $9 Million In Repairs Needed  An engineering firm in 2018 uncovered “abundant cracking and spalling” of concrete columns, beams and walls in the parking garage. Nearly three years before an oceanfront building collapsed near Miami, an engineering firm estimated that major repairs the building needed would cost more than $9 million, according to newly released emails. By Curt Anderson and Bernard Condon 

The $100 Billion U.S. Initiative to Deliver 16,128 Hiroshimas Reportedly, the U.S. is planning to spend something like $1.7 trillion over the coming three decades on “modernizing” our nuclear arsenal, including 12 submarines that could destroy the world several times over. By Frida Berrigan

Biden Will Enact Rule Proposed by Trump That Enables Big Pharma to Price Gouge The Biden administration is officially moving forward with a Trump rulemaking that would eliminate a key government power for driving down the costs of drugs and other inventions built from federal research.    The rulemaking was included in the administration’s “unified agenda of regulatory and deregulatory actions” for spring 2021 that was published on June 11. The agenda, compiled by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, outlines the actions that the administration intends to pursue in the near and long term.     It is in “final rule stage,” which means its promulgating agency, in this case the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), “plan[s] to publish a final rule or an interim final rule or to take other final action as the next step,” according to an accompanying document. The rule has been assigned a final action date of October 2021. By Donald Shaw 

U.S. Military Training Document Says Socialists Represent “Terrorist” Ideology A Navy training document asks, “Anarchists, socialists and neo-nazis represent which terrorist ideological category?” A Navy counterterrorism training document obtained exclusively by The Intercept appears to conflate socialists with terrorists and lists the left-wing ideology alongside “neo-nazis.” A section of the training document subtitled “Study Questions” includes the following: “Anarchists, socialists and neo-nazis represent which terrorist ideological category?” The correct answer is “political terrorists,” a military source briefed on the training told me. The document, titled “Introduction to Terrorism/Terrorist Operations,” is part of a longer training manual recently disseminated by the Naval Education Training and Command’s Navy Tactical Training Center in conjunction with the Center for Security Forces. The training is designed formasters-at-arms, the Navy’s internal police, the military source said. By Ken Klippenstein

Soldiers of Fortune: the Rise of Private Military Companies and their Consequences on America’s Wars War and conflict are synonymous with human history, and where there is conflict, there are often mercenaries who reap the profits. These “armies for hire” appeared as early as Ancient Egypt and Rome, with rulers deploying paid auxiliary forces to supplement imperial armies. In present-day America, mercenaries have consolidated into one of the strongest institutions in the United States: the corporation.    Mercenaries adapted to changing trends in statecraft and warfare by merging into corporate entities under the title of private military companies, or PMCs. America, the country with the strongest national military, is oddly the largest customer of PMCs. According to the Congressional Research Service, roughly 10% of America’s armed forces were privately contracted during WWII, but during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the proportion has grown to a staggering 50%. This past July, the Trump administration confirmed America’s affinity for PMCs when the president’s advisers recruited Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide security firm, and Stephen Feinberg, owner of the military contractor DynCorp International, to draft alternative military strategies in the Middle East that rely primarily on private contractors.

Military Contractors Quietly Boost Donations to GOP Backers of Trump’s Coup Attempt One critic of the weapons industry called it “another example of how our system for awarding money to contractors is often pay-to-play.” After a brief lull in political spending following the January 6 insurrection, military contractors are ramping up PAC donations to members of Congress on committees with influence over the distribution of Pentagon funds, including dozens of GOP lawmakers who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. By Kenny Stancil

Larissa Zimberoff: What Has Silicon Valley Done to Our Food? In a new book, the investigative journalist examines how companies have changed the way we eat in the name of climate change without always considering their products’ health impacts. Larissa Zimberoff’s new book, Technically Food: Inside Silicon Valley’s Mission to Change What We Eat, Zimberoff joins Robert Scheer on this week’s “Scheer Intelligence” to talk about how so many edible products are marketed as healthy when in fact they may be just the opposite. “We’ve had an obfuscated supermarket for a long time, filled with snack foods and junk foods and things we shouldn’t be eating,” the investigative journalist tells Scheer. “So the overhauling of the food system is mission-based. These companies purport to be wanting to save the planet from the climate crisis, wanting to end industrial animal agriculture, the death of animals, by creating these new foods. Now, I do think they believe that they can do that, but the thing is that once Silicon Valley’s in, once the investors are in, once Wall Street is in–then we’ve got people that expect to make money.”Environment:Earth System Research: Interacting Climate Tipping Points May Fall Like Dominoes Cascading changes could move Earth into a dangerous state for the future of humanity and nature  1)A new risk analysis has found that the tipping points of five of Earth’s subsystems — the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Amazon rainforest — could interact with each other in a destabilizing manner.     2) It suggests that these changes could occur even before temperatures reach 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels, which is the upper limit of the Paris Agreement.     3) The interactions between the different tipping elements could also lower critical temperature thresholds, essentially allowing tipping cascades to occur earlier than expected, according to the research.      And 4)Experts not involved in the study say the findis are a significant contribution to the field, but do not adequately address the timescales over which these changes could occur. By Elizabeth Claire AlbertsGAR Special Report on Drought 2021 Droughts have deep, widespread and underestimated impacts on societies, ecosystems, and economies. They incur costs that are borne disproportionately by the most vulnerable people.  The extensive impacts of drought are consistently underreported even though they span large areas, cascade through systems and scales, and linger through time, affecting millions of people and contributing to food insecurity, poverty, and inequality. Climate change is increasing temperatures and disrupting rainfall patterns, increasing the frequency, severity, and duration of droughts in many regions across the globe.  As we move towards a 2˚C warmer world, urgent action is required to better understand and more effectively manage drought risk to reduce the devastating toll on human lives and livelihoods, and ecosystems.

Black Liberation/Civil Rights:

 Labor:

The Labor Bureaucracy Betrayed the Entire Working Class During the 1980s. One Part in Their ‘Parnership With Boss’ Was the Implication of the Tow, Three, Many Waged Tiered System. This was Codified in 1985 and Labor Bureaucacys’ Lead Race to the Bottom for the  EntireWorkingClass.     (This ‘Partnership’ Became the Openly Declared Policy of the AFL-CIO When Sweeny Became President of the AFL-CIO)Economy:Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update (June 24th to 28th,   Money Supplr Surge Accelerated

• “Basic M1” Money Supply Growth Jumped to a Record 81.0% Above Its Pre-Pandemic Trough, with May M2, M3 and the Mid-June Monetary Base All at Record Levels of Activity; Money Supply Details Are Posted on the ALTERNATE DATA TAB (Above) and in the MONEY SUPPLY Paragraph (SYSTEMIC RISK)
• Fed Chairman Powell Acknowledged Some “Temporary” Near-Term Inflation Issues, as Headline Inflation Surged Amidst Faltering Economic Activity
• Both CPI and PPI Annual Inflation Continued to Set New Multi-Decade or Record Highs in May 2021
• Evolving Numbers Confirm an FOMC-Induced “Unrecognized” Recession Hit in August 2018 and Still Was Deepening at the Time of the March 2020 Pandemic Shutdown
• Specifically, Annual Benchmarkings Revised 2020 Industrial Production Activity Lower by 4.8% (-4.8%) and Deepened the 2020 Real Trade Deficit by 1.4% (-1.4%), on Top of Earlier, Negative Revisions to Payrolls and Retail Sales
• These Foreshadow a Downside GDP Benchmark Revision and Confirm a Slowdown Was in Place, Leading Into the Pandemic Shutdown May 2021 Employment Numbers Confirm the U.S. Economy Remains Far From Recovery

General Headlines Pandemic

• Driven U.S. Economic Collapse Continues to Harden in a Protracted “L”-Shaped Non-Recovery
• Revisions and Pending Revisions to Key Economic Numbers Show Not Only That the Collapse Was Worse Than Headlined, But Also That the Unfolding Recovery Has Been Much Weaker Than Indicated
• Severe Systemic Structural Damage from the Shutdown Is Forestalling Meaningful Economic Rebound into 2022 or Beyond, Irrespective of the Advances in Coronavirus Vaccines
• Panicked, Unlimited Federal Reserve Money Creation and Federal Government Deficit Spending Continue and Likely Will Expand, Triggering Major Domestic Inflation
• With Fundamental Dollar Debasement Intensifying, Holding Physical Gold and Silver Protects the Purchasing Power of One’s Assets, Irrespective of Any Near-Term Central Bank or Other Machinations to the Contrary.

Florida Condo Collapse: Nobody Told Homeowners that their Building Was Sinking “at an Alarming Rate” Surfside is a town just north of Miami Beach, Florida. It was incorporated in 1935. At approximately 1:23 a.m. yesterday, part of a 12-story high-rise collapsed in the town leaving 99 people missing and four confirmed deaths as of early this morning. The condo building is known as Champlain Towers South and is located at 8777 Collins Ave. in Surfside.   A report in USA Today has now left the whole town of Surfside on edge. According to the report, Shimon Wdowinski, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Florida International University, co-published a study with Simone Fiaschi in April of last year that found that the condo building “had some kind of unusual movement,” and had been sinking at the rate of 2 mm per year during the course of the study, which looked at satellite data from 1993 to 1999. By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

World: