Daily News Digest January 31, 2023
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Bipartisan Robbing of Social Security Started With LBJ, When He Included It as Part of the General Fund!:Social Security Facts
ince 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 Capitalism 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:
We come now to Ukraine. The shadows may be many and the murk very thick, but you will never read of either in The Times. The corruption scandal now erupting in Kyiv and across the country seems to me confirmation that Ukraine has made itself in the post–Soviet era less a nation than a criminal enterprise. This often happens in failed states, where no one believes in anything anymore for the simple reason there is nothing left to believe in. It is then the shadows descend and all grows murky. — Patrick Lawrence: The Shadows Descend in Ukraine
Videos/Podcasts of the Day:
Ukraine’s Zelensky sends Love Letter to US Corporations, Promising ‘Big Business’ For Wall Street In a video address to a US corporate lobby group, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky thanked companies like BlackRock, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Starlink, insisting “everyone can become a big business by” investing in Ukraine, where “we are defending freedom and property”.
New Zealand floods: drone footage shows derailed train and landslides – video report
The Chris Hedges Report: Will Julian Assange Ever Be Free? The film Ithaka, the title taken from a poem by C.P Cavafy, chronicles the slow-motion torture and execution of the Australian journalist Julian Assange, currently awaiting extradition to the United States in a high security prison in London. It charts his journey from publisher of the most important revelations of our generation of fraud, war crimes, lies and corruption by the powerful to his refuge for seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London from 2012 to 2019, his seizure and arrest by British police, who enter the embassy to detain him, and harsh imprisonment in Belmarsh prison where he currently fights a U.S. extradition request. It unflinchingly portrays the terrible emotional cost to him and his family, including his father John, his wife Stella and their two young children. The film, directed by Ben Lawrence and produced by Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton, pits Assange, his family and his supporters against the opaque, ruthless and monolithic power of nation states, including Sweden, Great Britain and the United States, and more importantly the intelligence services that have long sought to silence and crush Julian in retribution.
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!)
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. — Louis D. Brandeis Quotes
The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. MLK, Beyond Vietnam
Patrick Lawrence: Biden’s Secret Stash If this president didn’t know he was in possession of classified documents, in some cases for more than a decade, he simply is not qualified to hold any public office allowing him such access.
Billionaire’s Lawsuit Against O’Rourke May Stifle Criticism of Money in Politics The lawsuit shows the oligarchic desire to wield political influence without being subject to public accountability. Arecent Texas lawsuit has opened a new front in the ongoing battle over the reign of money in politics, making it a prime example of how wealthy individuals and mighty corporations seek to wield political influence while avoiding public accountability. As Jordan Uhl reported in a January 2023 article for The Lever, Kelcy Warren, a Texas billionaire whose fortune derives from gas and propane pipelines, is suing former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke for defamation, because O’Rourke publicly criticized a million dollar donation Warren made to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, in 2021. Then there’s also a commonly repeated misstatement that fusion doesn’t create significant radioactive waste, a haunting reality for the world’s current fleet of nuclear plants. True, plutonium, which can be used as fuel in atomic weapons, isn’t a natural byproduct of fusion, but tritium is the radioactive form of hydrogen. Its little isotopes are great at permeating metals and finding ways to escape tight enclosures. Obviously, this will pose a significant problem for those who want to continuously breed tritium in a fusion reactor. It also presents a concern for people worried about radioactivity making its way out of such facilities and into the environment. “Cancer is the main risk from humans ingesting tritium. When tritium decays it spits out a low-energy electron (roughly 18,000 electron volts) that escapes and slams into DNA, a ribosome, or some other biologically important molecule,” David Biello explains in Scientific American. “And, unlike other radionuclides, tritium is usually part of water, so it ends up in all parts of the body and therefore can, in theory, promote any kind of cancer. But that also helps reduce the risk: any tritiated water is typically excreted in less than a month.”
In Deeply Unequal Societies, the Thieving Always Thrive What makes for a thieving culture? An overabundance of pickpockets? Tsunamis of burglary and shoplifting? Most definitely not. To truly gauge a society’s larcenous leanings, many of us would posit, we need to look beyond the nimble-fingered and focus more on the smooth-talkers, the power-suited flimflammers who thrive in any society where significant numbers of people feel a driving need to get rich quick. The most recent example? Federal prosecutors last month charged the crypto currency CEO phenom Sam Bankman-Fried with committing “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.” The 30-year-old billionaire, the Securities and Exchange Commission charges in a separate filing, built an immense financial empire on a “house of cards.”
Air Force Gen. Mike Minihan Struck a Dr. Strangelove Pose in Urging the Troops Under His Command to be Ready to Fight China in Two Years. “Aim for the head.” This is the message blasted out by four star Air Force general and Air Mobility Command head General Michael A. Minihan about the preparation needed for a potential war between the US and China in two years. Gen. Minihan’s rhetoric is reminiscent of his keynote speech at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air Space & Cyber Conference in September. In that address, Minihan expresses his aggressive mentality stating, “Lethality matters most…When you can kill your enemy, every part of your life is better. Your food tastes better. Your marriage is stronger.
Environment — Ecosocialism of Ecocide!:
If that sounds problematic, that’s because it is. This country’s above-ground atomic bomb testing in the 1950s and 1960s was responsible for most of the man-made tritium that’s lingering in the environment. And it will be at least 2046, 84 years after the last American atmospheric nuclear detonation in Nevada, before tritium there will no longer pose a problem for the area. — Nuclear Fusion Won’t Save the Climate, But It Might Blow Up the World
No False Solutions! Citizens Rise Up to Resist Dangerous Carbon Pipelines in the Midwest If the Midwest Carbon Express is built, residents across the Midwest will bear the risks associated with the pipeline, while its financial backers will reap the profits Iowa is the battle ground where the fate of world’s largest proposed carbon capture and storage pipeline is being decided. Summit Carbon Solutions intends to build a 2,000-mile pipeline to carry CO2 captured from ethanol plants across five states, to eventually inject and store it underground in North Dakota to supposedly reduce carbon emissions. But who truly stands to gain if the pipeline is built? A November 2022 report from the Oakland Institute, The Great Carbon Boondoggle, unmasked the billion-dollar financial interests and high-level political ties driving the project—despite opposition from a large and diverse coalition of Indigenous groups, farmers, and environmentalists.
Death in the Marshes: Environmental Calamity Hits Iraq’s Unique Wetlaands Rivers, and Lakes That Have Nurtured Communities Since Civilisation’s Dawn Are Drying Up, As Drought Leads To Hunger, Displacement And Simmering Conflict
Georgia is Seeking to Define ‘Cop City’ Protests as Terrorism, Experts Say Actions by police match rhetoric from state politicians seeking to define a largely peaceful protest movement as terrorism When author and environmental movement expert Will Potter saw the Atlanta police chief, Darin Schierbaum, tell a recent press conference “it doesn’t take a rocket scientist or an attorney to tell you that breaking windows and setting fires is not protest – it’s terrorism”, he could not believe his ears.
Civil Rights Black Liberation:
History Repeats Itself! Police/Extraleagal Violence Overthrough Reconstruction. Today, The same type of violenceis being used to overturn the gains of the civil rights movement!: “How did they accomplish this betrayal? The answer is simple— The answer is simple —By the Use of Terrorism! — They used police and terroristic Ku Klux Klan violence. These extra-legal and ‘legal’ activities laid the basis for the overthrow of Black Reconstruction and the institutionalization of legal segregation (Jim Crow) in the former slave states. To enforce Jim Crow, Black people were, for decades, indiscriminately lynched and framed.” — The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement
Plea Bargains Are a Tool of Racist Mass Incarceration The U.S. bases an entire criminal legal system on backroom “deals” that are sure to end in convictions. The U.S. criminal legal system is racist. By now, this proposition is so well established that it’s hard to believe anyone disagrees with it. Mass incarceration shifted the prison demographic from more than 70 percent white to nearly 70 percent Black and Latinx by 1989. In certain areas of the South, people of color are nearly four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than whites. According to some studies, Black people nationwide are three times more likely than whites to have been charged with a felony and five times more likely to get locked up. As of 2022, Despite being just over 13 percent of the overall population, Black people make up 38 percent of the country’s incarcerated population — and that number appears to have increased over the last decade.
The Historic Role of Police Brutality in the Black Community and African American Oppression To begin to understand, the role of the police, the following quotes By Jame Baldwin, which are still true today, they act like an army of occupation.: “Harlem (The Black Community) is policed like occupied territory.”—James Baldwin, A Report from Occupied Territory. “And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover — even in a country which makes the grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity — quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty. — James Baldwin, From ‘Victim’ to ‘Threat’: James Baldwin and the Demands of Self-Respect . . . . The Police Originated from the first slave patrols in 1704, which first got established in the South and lasted until 1861. Their original role was to catch run away slaves. An important part of Black history is the destruction of Reconstruction, which lasted for a decade after the Civil War, and the establishment of Jim Crow in the South and racial segregation in the North. Reconstruction officially ended with the “Compromise of 1876.”
Labor:
The Demographic Future and Labour Meeting the social needs of the world’s population through the production of goods and services depends on the amount of labour employed (in numbers and hours) and on the productivity of those of employed. Under capitalism, of course, what matters more is the profitability to the owners of the means of production from employing workers and in investing in productivity-enhancing technology. It is a fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production that the required profitability of those owning the means of production becomes an obstacle to the required production to meet the social needs of the billions of humanity (and, for that matter, to sustain the health of the planet and other species
Economy:
Add 4,281 Hedge Fund Clients to What Makes JPMorgan Chase the Riskiest Mega Bank in the U.S. According to a Yale School of Management study, in 2013 JPMorgan Chase had 1,339 hedge fund clients. As of July of last year, that number had soared to 4,281 according to the annual Convergence Inc. study. While Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley topped the total number of hedge fund clients (with 5,150 and 4,964, respectively) JPMorgan Chase ranked number one in terms of hedge fund Assets Under Advisement (AUA). (See Convergence Inc. study linked above.) There’s a big problem here that federal bank regulators are choosing to ignore at the peril of the U.S. financial system. JPMorgan Chase, unlike Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, is the largest federally insured, taxpayer backstopped, depository bank in the United States with more than $2.47 trillion in deposits as of June 30, 2022. Unfortunately, as a result of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, this mom and pop depository bank with more than 5,000 Chase bank branches spread across the United States, is also allowed to make wild trading gambles. Those trading gambles have resulted in felony charges by the U.S. Department of Justice for rigging the foreign exchange markets, the U.S. Treasury market, and the precious metals markets.
World:
‘War Is Clearly Back on the Agenda’: US Says Israel Was Behind the Drone Attack on Iran “This latest act of sabotage conducted via a military attack inside Iran is a dangerous escalation and should be cause for concern for everyone who opposes war,” said one campaigner. Unnamed U.S. officials on Sunday confirmed suspicions that Israel was behind the weekend drone attack on a purported military facility in the Iranian city of Isfahan, heightening concerns that the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is gearing up for a broader assault on Iran as international nuclear talks remain at a standstill. The New York Timesreported that the drone attack—which Iran says it mostly thwarted—was “the work of the Mossad, Israel’s premier intelligence agency, according to senior intelligence officials who were familiar with the dialogue between Israel and the United States about the incident.”
Education. Health, 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!
The Government Developed the Vaccine — Big Pharma Profitted:_ But it is big pharma that develops the vaccine from the scientific work of public institutes. They call the shots. The drugs companies do the global clinical trials, then produce and market the result. Then they sell the vaccines to governments at huge profits. This is the way things were done before the pandemic – and now. In the US, in the 10-year period between 1988 and 1997, public-sector expenditures for vaccine purchases doubled from $100 to $200 per child through age 6. The cumulative public-sector cost doubled again in less than 5 years between 1997 and 2001, from $200 to almost $400 per child.Very little is still known about the terms of the COVID vaccine contracts that EU governments have signed with pharma groups including AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech, Sanofi-GlaxoSmithKline and CureVac. But once the secrecy is peeled away, what we will see is a massive privatisation of billions of dollars of government funds. It is reckoned that the AstraZeneca has sold its jab to governments at about $3 to $4 a dose, while the Johnson & Johnson shot and the vaccine jointly developed by Sanofi and GSK were priced at about $10 a dose. AstraZeneca has promised not to profit from its jab during the pandemic, but that applies only until July 2021. After that, they can cash in. US biotech Moderna! — COVID Vaccines: Calling the Shots
Moderna’s Home State Newspaper to Biden: ‘Play Hardball’ Over Covid Vaccine Price Hike “The Biden administration has not taken any serious steps to ensure that Moderna’s vaccine will be reasonably priced—let alone accessible to anyone who wants it,” wrote The Boston Globe‘s editorial board. The largest daily newspaper in Moderna’s home state of Massachusetts published an editorial on Sunday urging the Biden administration to “play hardball” with the pharmaceutical giant over its plan to raise the price of its Covid-19 vaccine by up to 4,000% over the cost of production, a proposal that has drawn backlash from vaccine equity campaigners and members of Congress.