Daily News Digest January 5, 2023

Daily News Digest Archives

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Perhaps You Were Unclear on the Meaning of the TermBendib: Zionist Taliban

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”, is Still True for Today’s World!Capitalism as a Failed  System: World Capilalism Has Been Aware of the Comming Catastrophe of Global Warming  Over 5 Decades 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 very future of Humanity Is Now At stake!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:

Burning BooKs? Science Fiction is Now!: 19 of the Best Fahrenheit 451 Quotes Ray Bradbury packs so much into each of his words, each of his lines. You’ve got quotes about fire and censorship, but just as many quotes about knowledge and its transcendent power. From one-liners that make your breath catch, to paragraphs that race, here are the Fahrenheit 451 quotes that struck me the hardest:

Videos/Podcasts of the Day:

If You Watch These Three Video’s You Will Know Why The Press Monopoly Attacked Him/Slandered Him!

1. Michael Jackson – Man In The Mirror

2. Michael Jackson Earth Song

3. Michael Jackson They Don’t Really Care About Us

United 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 ownership of the Republicrats and who profit from war and the war budget, vote 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. Rax the Rich!  — They Can Afford To Pay! Both Parties Support U.S. Capitalism’s Wars! (The Only War the Democrats Opposed was the Civil War!):

The Espionage was/is Used by the United States  to Attack Julian Assange And Freedom of the Press!: A Century of Repression: The Espionage Act and Freedom of the Press Since the First World War, successive administrations deployed the Espionage Act for varied political purposes, both domestic and foreign. Some prosecutions resulted in sensational trials; others were little noticed or understood. Indeed, the Act has existed under the public radar for significant lengths of time. It lives in the shadows of virtually every military conflict and foreign policy controversy in the past century. How the Espionage Act of 1917 is the most important yet least understood law threatening freedom of the press in modern American history.

Decolonize, de-Imperialize, and Restore Sovereignty As a child of the 1950s and ‘60s I cannot help but see flashes of Vietnam in Empire’s latest – hopefully its final – military expedition(s).  Social media platforms and television propaganda maintain a persistent numbness.  Institutional and individual indifference breeds a hunger for bread and circuses, football, Disneyland, talk shows and star-spangled “influencers,” who excrete toxic slime from every crack and crevice.  The system now occupies every square inch of terrain.  Bureaucrats, bored out of their minds, nevertheless read the latest memo from Washington directing street operations programmed to steer the “hive mind” hither and yon, round and round, to a place called nowhere.     It’s hard aimless work averting eyeballs — already robbed of their gaze — day in, day out, away from the wretched, inhumane global slave quarters and killing zones where pillage of the last untrammeled forests, grasslands, and scenic vistas produce commodities and emerging, synthetic  “Green” markets needed to keep the insatiable machines, financial schemes and meaningless political simulations from totally melting down.  Down this road is one logical end: suicide.     Will this latest proxy war keep Western (vassal) societies in Europe and elsewhere under control as they face increasingly difficult hardships, a direct result of the suicidal policies of the U.S. government’s mannequin class?

Banning Books Is Perverse and Vulgar Nothing is so grotesque, foolish, or wrong as trying to put blinders on young people’s natural curiosity. Excuse me for using explicit language here, but it seems to me that today’s most vulgar expression of right-wing extremist dogma is its unhealthy obsession with banning books. It’s a political perversion that, ironically, its participants usually rationalize by claiming they are “battling vulgarity.”

Was the Southwest Airlines Meltdown Impacted By the “Great Share-Buyback Scam”? Here’s how it works. If you’re the CEO of Southwest Airlines, or most any publicly traded corporation, there are two main ways you can increase your own compensation.  They are:

1. Build the company: Invest in workers and technology. Open new routes. Provide better service to passengers. Upgrade your planes so people will want to fly with you. Pay your people better to build employee retention.

2. Use company profits to buy back and retire Southwest stock.

3. According to corporate watchdog US, most of the evidence suggests the immediate predecessor to Southwest’s new CEOchose door number two as often as possible.

Amid the Climate Crisis, Covid, and Crumbling Democracies, I Find Hope in People Who Show the best of Humanity It’s the potential of individuals to change the world which is at the heart of democratic liberalism – but their actions must be matched by global support As we farewell 2022, many of the world’s citizens will be hoping for a better new year. It is hard to look back on the past year – indeed couple of years – without a high degree of angst about the direction of our global community.     We have been battered by a pandemic that, while past the peak for most nations, is still disrupting societies and economies. After two years of its hermit-like isolation, 1.4 billion Chinese citizens are now experiencing a nationwide Covid onslaught for the first time with ripples that will not only affect the lives of those in China but the rest of the world linked to the second largest economy.

Environment — Ecosocialism or Ecocide:

Ecosocialism Not Extinction!

Hot Water: Radioactive Contaminants are Seeping Into Drinking Water Around the US . . . A federal report in 2007 acknowledged that two wells sourced by the water company were at risk of contamination from the site. “The EPA has said we’re at risk,” says Knack. And Golden State, she says, has at times used “possibly a very hefty portion of that well water.” To date, radioactivity above the natural level has not been detected in Golden State’s water. — Concerns across the Country — All water contains some level of radiation; the amount and type can vary significantly. Production of nuclear weapons and energy from fissionable material is one potential source. Mining for uranium is another. Radioactive elements can be introduced into water via medical treatments, including radioactive iodine used to treat thyroid disorders. And it can be unearthed during oil and gas drilling, or any industrial activities that involve cracking into bedrock where radioactive elements naturally exist. What’s more, because of their natural presence, these elements can occasionally seep into aquifers even without being provoked.

Antarctica : An Inevitable Climate Tipping Point? For the last article in our series with the CNRS, we are going to Antarctica, more commonly known as “the white continent” or “the 6th continent“.      Antarctica is fascinating in every way. Firstly, few people will have the chance to go. Indeed, unless you work for science or are a wealthy tourist who likes to walk around in a -30°C weather, there is very little chance of finding a selfie of you on the Pine Island glacier. But why should we be interested in what is happening 15,000km away from metropolitan France?     The answer is similar to the one we could have given for each article so far. Quite simply: if we don’t care about Antarctica, Antarctica will care about us. Strange as it may seem, Antarctica does have one thing in common with the Amazon: they are both subject to a possible climate tipping point. In the case of Antarctica, this point of no return could have global consequences for hundreds of millions of people, including in France!

From Whither Humanity? The Environmental Crisis of Capitalism We Don’t Need a Green New Deal! — We Need a Green Industrial Revolution! An increase of this magnitude (20 degrees Fahrenheit) would flood most cities and industrial centers in the world as the ice caps melt into the sea raising the sea level. According to the U.S. Geological Survey3, if all of the ice caps melted, it is estimated t sea level could rise more than 80 meters or 262 feet. The potential catastrophic results of global warming and the threat to humanity’s future should become an immediate concern.Table 1. Estimated potential maximum sea-level rise from the total melting of present-day glaciers.  There’s No Such Thing as ‘Freak’ Weather Any More – And 2023 Already Looks Like a Disaster Movie As Storm Elliott rages and 2022 is declared the UK’s warmest year yet, why are leaders still in denial about extreme weather? The 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow was based on the idea that the main north Atlantic Ocean current could slow and then reverse, superstorms would flash-freeze the northern hemisphere and a new ice age would abruptly descend. It was dismissed as “profoundly silly”, “a ludicrous popcorn thriller” informed by “lousy science”, and some scientists argued it depicted meteorological phenomena “as occurring over days, instead of decades or centuries”. Storm Elliott, the “bomb cyclone” that hit the US over the holidays, should have made some of those critics uncomfortable. Temperatures in places plunged in just a few minutes as one of the greatest North American storms ever recorded swept down from the Arctic to Mexico, sometimes at hurricane speed. It brought death, chaos, and misery for tens of millions of people.

Civil Rights Black Liberation:

False Match That Led to Arrest Highlights Danger of Facial Recognition “Law enforcement must drop this dangerous technology—we shouldn’t have to worry about being falsely arrested because an algorithm gets it wrong,” said the ACLU after a Georgia man was misidentified as a purse thief.     Instead of enjoying a late Thanksgiving meal with his mother in Georgia, Randal Reid spent nearly a week in jail in November after he was falsely identified as a luxury purse thief by Louisiana authorities using facial recognition technology.     That’s according to Monday reporting by NOLA.com, which caught the attention of Fight for the Future, a digital rights group that has long advocated against law enforcement and private entities using such technology, partly because of its shortcomings and the risk of outcomes like this.

Labor: 

Economy:

Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update January 3rd to January 5th

• December Construction Spending; the prior e-mail, previewing the Gold Price – Inflation Relationship and related text and graphs in advance of the pending. IN THE NEWS:
• Consistent with an ongoing, deepening recession, today’s November 2022 Real Construction Spending continued in annual collapse, down sharply year-to-year for the 14th straight month, on track for its fifth straight quarter of year-to-year decline, and its third-consecutive quarter-to-quarter contraction.
• Pending coverage: November 2022 Trade Deficit on January 5th, December Employment and Unemployment on January 6th.

There’re Forever Blowing Bubbles: The Fed, FDIC and OCC Issue New Warnings to Banks on Crypto Risks to Safety and Soundness After multiple federally-insured banks involved with crypto have watched their publicly-traded stocks crater in price over the past year (see above chart); after a former Fed insider blew the whistle on what’s been going down as a result of the Fed’s hands off approach to policing crypto banks; after alleged fraudster operation, FTX, quietly bought a large stake in a federally-insured bank in the state of Washington; and after Senators Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith sent a blistering demand for answers to the Fed, FDIC, and OCC on December 7 – those three federal agencies issued a new warning to banks yesterday on what life in the crypto lane could mean to their future. The warnings included the following:    “The events of the past year have been marked by significant volatility and the exposure of vulnerabilities in the crypto-asset sector. These events highlight a number of key risks associated with crypto-assets and crypto-asset sector participants that banking organizations should be aware of, including:

World: 

Lenin’s Struggle Against Bureaucracy Today, 4 January 2023, marks the centenary of Lenin’s dictation of his postscript to his ‘Letter to the Congress’, also known as his ‘Testament’. In it, Lenin took up the struggle against the bureaucratisation of the Soviet state, which was threatening to derail all the gains of the revolution. Suppressed for decades by Stalin, this Testament dispels the slander that Stalinism was the continuation of Leninism. In conjunction with his last articles and letters, Lenin’s Testament gives evidence of the importance that he attached to the danger of the growing bureaucracy. In his letter and postscript, Lenin explicitly calls for the removal of Stalin as general secretary of the Communist Party, and contrasts him to Trotsky, who he described as “the most capable man on the present CC”.

Peru: All Out for an Indefinite Strike, Overthrow Capital! This is the text of a leaflet, issued by the comrades of the IMT in Peru on 4 January, when there was a call for an indefinite general strike in the southern regions of the country, as part of the struggle to oppose the coup against President Castillo. Almost a month has passed since the coup against the government of Pedro Castillo. A coup orchestrated by CONFIEP [the bosses’ organization], the bourgeois state apparatus, Fujimorism, the mining multinationals, and the US embassy against a president democratically elected by the working people of Peru.

Health Education and Welfare:

The government of the United States can pass laws in a few days to spend tens of trillions of dollars for war and the bailout of Wall Street and the bankers. Yet, those who, pass universal healthcare for themselves, but cannot spend even one trillion dollars for universal health for those who are ‘governed’! This is what is considered, by the powers to be,  a democracy and part of the democratic way. — Roland Sheppard, Let the People  Vote on Healthcare    

‘Much-Welcome Step’: FDA Rule Change Will Let Retail Pharmacies Offer Abortion Pills “This is the most important government action today and it didn’t involve Kevin McCarthy,” said one journalist.     The Food and Drug Administration late Tuesday formalized a regulatory change that will allow retail pharmacies in the U.S. to dispense abortion pills for the first time, removing a major barrier to access as Republican lawmakers wage all-out war on abortion throughout the country.

Doctors Seek to Bar Corporate Control of Health Practices  Advocates want to enforce statutes banning ownership of medical practices by corporations not owned by physicians.     A group of emergency physicians and consumer advocates in multiple states are pushing for stiffer enforcement of decades-old statutes that prohibit the ownership of medical practices by corporations not owned by licensed doctors.     Thirty-three states plus the District of Columbia have rules on their books against the so-called corporate practice of medicine. But over the years, critics say, companies have successfully sidestepped bans on owning medical practices by buying or establishing local staffing groups that are nominally owned by doctors and restricting the physicians’ authority so they have no direct control.