Daily News Digest March 14, 2023
Capitalism is Now a Worldwide Threat to Humanity! It is on the Fast Track to Global Warming and/or Nuclear War Catastrophes!
Images of the Day:
Don’t Worry, There’s a Winner
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 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:
I’m scared to death about the denial of science. Science is real. Science is the most real thing in our world, other than nature. I’m hoping we’ll all get back to a place where we can really understand that science is tested knowledge. — Harrison Ford
Trust us, says the league that paid millions to quarterback Colin Kaepernick and defensive back Eric Reid to settle their claim that the league colluded to blackball them for their politics.—Scott Ostler, San Francisco Chronicle, 2 Feb. 2022
If the language is not precise, the Class I railroads will avoid the scope of the law without violating the law, yet again putting the safety of our members and American communities into harm’s way, said Eddie Hall, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, in a statement. ‘You can run a freight train through the loopholes.’ — Another Norfolk Southern Train Derailed as Its CEO Testified Before the Senate
Videos/Podcasts of the Day:
China’s Middle East Deal: Iran & Saudi Arabia Reestablish Relations as U.S. Watches from Sidelines
Climate & Indigenous Activists Decry Biden’s Approval of Willow Oil Drilling Project in Arctic
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. Tax 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
Michael Hudson: Why the Banking System is Breaking Up The collapses of Silvergate and Silicon Valley Bank are like icebergs calving off from the Antarctic glacier. The financial analogy to the global warming causing this collapse is the rising temperature of interest rates, which spiked last Thursday and Friday to close at 4.60 percent for the U.S. Treasury’s two-year bonds. Bank depositors meanwhile were still being paid only 0.2 percent on their deposits. That has led to a steady withdrawal of funds from banks – and a corresponding decline in commercial bank balances with the Federal Reserve. Most media reports reflect a prayer that the bank runs will be localized, as if there is no context or environmental cause. There is general embarrassment to explain how the breakup of banks that is now gaining momentum is the result of the way that the Obama Administration bailed out the banks in 2008. Fifteen years of Quantitative Easing has re-inflated prices for packaged bank mortgages – and with them, housing prices, stock and bond prices. The Fed’s $9 trillion of QE (not counted as part of the budget deficit) fueled an asset-price inflation that made trillions of dollars for holders of financial assets, with a generous spillover effect for the remaining members of the top Ten Percent. The cost of home ownership soared by capitalizing mortgages at falling interest rates into more highly debt-leveraged property. The U.S. economy experienced the largest bond-market boom in history as interest rates fell below 1 percent. The economy polarized between the creditor positive-net-worth class and the rest of the economy – whose analogy to environmental pollution and global warming was debt pollution.
Of Debts, Deficits, and Recession Threat The Joe Biden Admin-istration is hoping against hope that the Republicans, who now control the House of Representatives, will finally agree to increase the “debt ceiling”—the legal limit on the total amount of federal debt Uncle Sam can accrue. However, with the government and the opposition unable to come to an agreement, it is giving some anxious moments to Biden & Co amidst growing fears of a default. I n his recent annual State of the Union speech to Congress, US President Joe Biden called for a range of policies that would “boost opportunity and reduce poverty, improve health and well-being, and advance widely shared prosperity.” He also criticized oil companies for making high profits and other firms for benefiting at the expense of consumers, and he challenged the opposition Republicans, who now control the lower House of Representatives, to lift what is called the “debt ceiling”, to allow the administration to borrow more to finance its budget plans. Biden said that the administration would “fully pay” for his expansive policies and so reduce the federal government deficit by $1 tn by requiring well-off households and profitable corporations to pay a “fairer amount of taxes.” This promise was to be achieved over the next decade. In the immediate period, the government deficit
Biden Rejection of DC’s Criminal Code Reforms Reminds Us of His Past Contributions to Mass Incarceration Biden should have risen above the fray and promised to veto right-wing efforts to . Instead, he did the opposite—abandoning the people of DC and his own campaign promises to oppose mandatory minimum sentences and significantly reduce the prison population.
Environment — Ecosocialism of Ecocide!:
Biden Denounced for ‘Appalling’ Approval of Willow Oil Project “There is simply no justification for President Biden’s decision to approve a massive new oil drilling scheme that will lead to decades of air and climate pollution,” said one critic. U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday greenlighted a massive oil drilling project on federal land in Alaska, eliciting outrage from climate advocates who say the administration’s accompanying restrictions on oil and gas leasing in the region cannot make up for the destruction set to be unleashed by the approved Willow project.
‘Shocking’: Saudi Aramco Posts Largest-Ever Annual Profit for a Fossil Fuel Company “These extraordinary profits, and any future income derived from Aramco, should not be deployed to finance human rights abuses, cover them up, or try and gloss over them,” said Amnesty International.
Another Norfolk Southern Train Derailed as Its CEO Testified Before the Senate CEO Alan Shaw faced tough questions about the company’s response to the derailment and chemical disaster in Ohio. Another Norfolk Southern freight train derailment was reported on Thursday as CEO Alan Shaw testified before the Senate Environment and Public Health Committee examining the earlier derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals that caused an environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio.
The deception, liess, untruths, and deceit, of the 1%! Norfolk Southern Hired the Firm Testing Air In East Palestine Homes. Experts Warn the Checks are Lacking Last month, Brenda Foster stood on the railroad tracks at the edge of her yard in East Palestine, Ohio and watched a smoky inferno billow from the wreckage of a derailed train. The chemicals it was carrying – and the fire that consumed them – were so toxic that the entire area had to evacuate. Foster packed up her 87-year-old mother and they fled to stay with relatives.With a headache, sore throat, burning eyes and a cough, Foster returned home five days later – as soon as authorities allowed. So when she saw on TV that there was a hotline for residents with health concerns, she dialed as soon as the number popped up on the screen. The people who arrived offered to test the air inside her home for free. She was so eager to learn the results, she didn’t look closely at the paper they asked her to sign. Within minutes of taking measurements with a hand-held machine, one of them told her they hadn’t detected any harmful chemicals. Foster moved her mother back the same day. What she didn’t realize is that the page of test results that put her mind at ease didn’t come from the government or an independent watchdog. CTEH, the contractor that provided them, was hired by Norfolk Southern, the operator of the freight train that derailed.
Civil Rights Black Liberation:
The NFL’s Blackball of Colin Kaepernick was a Demonstaration of the Racism of the 1%’s NFL Owners!: Looking at the Skeletons Inside the NFL’s Closet Renowned sports journalist Dave Zirin talks about his latest documentary, which explores the unjust, unfair and deeply racist history of the NFL coupled with its commitment to nationalism, militarism and corporatism. In the new documentary Behind the Shield: The Power & Politics of the NFL, created by Dave Zirin, the trailblazing sports writer and journalist for The Nation magazine breaks down the idea of such an ingrained cultural phenomenon as American football while dissecting the NFL for all its bitter contradictions and failures. From understanding why jets fly over stadiums before games to why the second ever Black coach was only hired in 1989, Zirin dives into the odious history that defines the sport today.
Labor:
Playing the Pension Funds:Michael Hudson: Well, there’s something very radical happened that people haven’t been talking about very much. Normally a budget is supposed to decide what gets funded and what doesn’t get funded, and it’s simply a decision of what to cut back. A budget is not supposed to rewrite the law. But what happened is something very radical. They rewrote two laws. One of the laws was about bank derivatives that Elizabeth Warren has spoken about, promising to bail out Citibank and other banks. If they lose on derivatives, they’re going to get bailed out like they did in 2008. And the other was a decision not to bail out the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the government’s pension fund insurer. They’ve decided–they passed a new law. They rewrote the law. They declared the 1974 ERISA act protecting pensions illegal, and they said if pension funds cannot pay their retirees, they get to be cut back and they don’t get to go to the government to get guarantee. We’ve abolished the government guarantee on pension funds if the pension fund is run by a labor union, meaning if a pension fund is a multiemployer fund that has more than one employer contributing to it, like airline funds, truckers funds, Teamsters funds if you’re a truck driver, insurance employees, we’re going to give the fund managers, mainly the financial managers on Wall Street, the right to cut back on these pensions that are due. So the pensions that people had expected to receive when they made their wage contract saying, well, we’re not going to ask for as fast a wage increase if you give us security when we retire, all of this has been rewritten. And the ironic thing is the Democrats led this fight against labor a year ago, this special ruling was put in, and people who were supposed to be Democratic liberals, like Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, decided to have something also radical in the new budget. They weren’t going to report which representatives voted yes or no for these amendments. So the Democrats covered up their tracks, and you can’t see that they were really behind the Wall Street constituency in saying, we’re going to cut back the pensions. And you can see what’s on the mind, basically. The government said, look, we’ve got to balance the budget in the face of Obama’s sort of escalating the military confrontation with Russia and China. And on the face of increased bailout for the banks, there’s just not going to be enough money to guarantee the pension funds. So we can’t do for the pensioners what we did for the bankers in 2008.
No Quarantee for Milti-Employer Penain Plans!: Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation Figure Multiemployer Program . . . According to PBGC, the enactment of the Bipartisan American Miners Act of 2019 delayed the projected insolvency of the multiemployer program, primarily by providing federal funding for the United Mine Workers Plan. This improved PBGC’s net financial position by at least $6.0 billion. PBGC’s projections of multiemployer program insolvency do not, however, include any fiscal year 2020 information reflecting the economic effects of—or the federal response to—the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, which may affect the program’s estimated insolvency date. the multiemployer program becomes insolvent, participants in insolvent pension plans that receive financial assistance from PBGC will receive a small fraction of current statutory guarantees. PBGC’s fiscal year 2019 projections show that in 2027 the program’s income from premiums would cover less than 14 percent of financial assistance. Figure 10: Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation’s (PBGC) Net Financial Position of the Single-Employer and Multiemployer Programs Combined, Fiscal Years 2000 through 2020
Economy:
Silicon Valley Bank Used Former Mccarthy Staffers to Weaken Regulations, Lobby Fdic Two senior aides to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy were among the top lobbyists for the bank at the center of a new financial crisis. After successfully lobbying for the rollback of new rules applied to Wall Street in the wake of the financial crisis, lobbyists for Silicon Valley Bank immediately began pressing their case further to the federal authority that insures bank deposits in the event of another crisis, according to lobbying disclosures reviewed by The Intercept. The lobbying effort managed to exempt banks the size of Silicon Valley Bank from more stringent regulations, including stress tests aimed at uncovering the type of weaknesses that led to the bank’s implosion Friday. Two of the bank’s top lobbyists previously served as senior staffers for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who himself pushed for the repeal of significant pieces of the landmark Wall Street reform legislation known as Dodd-Frank.
Where Were the Regulators as SVB Crashed? Silicon Valley Bank grew too fast using borrowed money—and the risks were lurking in plain sight Silicon Valley Bank’s failure boils down to a simple misstep: It grew too fast using borrowed short-term money from depositors who could ask to be repaid at any time, and invested it in long-term assets that it was unable, or unwilling, to sell. When interest rates rose quickly, it was saddled with losses that ultimately forced it to try to raise fresh capital, spooking depositors who yanked their funds in two days. The question following the bank’s takeover Friday: How could regulators have allowed it to grow so quickly and take on so much interest-rate risk?
Why the Banking System is Breaking Up The collapses of Silvergate and Silicon Valley Bank are like icebergs calving off from the Antarctic glacier. The financial analogy to the global warming causing this collapse is the rising temperature of interest rates, which spiked last Thursday and Friday to close at 4.60 percent for the U.S. Treasury’s two-year bonds. Bank depositors meanwhile were still being paid only 0.2 percent on their deposits. That has led to a steady withdrawal of funds from banks – and a corresponding decline in commercial bank balances with the Federal Reserve. Most media reports reflect a prayer that the bank runs will be localized, as if there is no context or environmental cause. There is general embarrassment to explain how the breakup of banks that is now gaining momentum is the result of the way that the Obama Administration bailed out the banks in 2008. Fifteen years of Quantitative Easing has re-inflated prices for packaged bank mortgages – and with them, housing prices, stock and bond prices. The Fed’s $9 trillion of QE (not counted as part of the budget deficit) fueled an asset-price inflation that made trillions of dollars for holders of financial assets, with a generous spillover effect for the remaining members of the top Ten Percent. The cost of home ownership soared by capitalizing mortgages at falling interest rates into more highly debt-leveraged property. The U.S. economy experienced the largest bond-market boom in history as interest rates fell below 1 percent. The economy polarized between the creditor positive-net-worth class and the rest of the economy – whose analogy to environmental pollution and global warming was debt pollution.
Silicon Valley Bank Was a Wall Street IPO Pipeline in Drag as a Federally-Insured Bank; FHLB of San Francisco Was Quietly Bailing It Out If you want to genuinely understand why Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failed and why Jerome Powell’s Fed led the effort yesterday to make sure $150 billion of the bank’s uninsured depositors’ money would be treated as FDIC insured and available today, you need to take a look at how the bank defined itself right up until it blew up on Friday. (That history is still available at the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine at this link. Give the page time to load.) This was a financial institution deployed to facilitate the goals of powerful venture capital and private equity operators, by financing tech and pharmaceutical startups until they could raise millions or billions of dollars in a Wall Street Initial Public Offering (IPO). The bank was also involved in managing the wealth of those startup millionaires or billionaires once they struck it big in an IPO.
World:
Why Did 250,000 Britons Die Sooner Than Expected? Life expectancy in Britain has flatlined in the last ten years James cook university hospital in Middlesbrough, in the north-east of England, is home to a world-leading heart unit. The unit was a pioneer in primary angioplasties, in which balloons are inflated inside blocked arteries to open up the vessels. In 2016 surgeons there fitted a 71-year-old woman with a wireless pacemaker no bigger than a grain of rice—the first operation of its kind outside a clinical trial. The unit marked its 30th birthday in January with news of funding for a research lab. But there was also a deflating sense of reality. Despite the unit’s successes, cardiovascular diseases still cause around one in five premature deaths in Middlesbrough. The town of 144,000 people has some of the worst mortality rates for heart disease in England. Life expectancy at birth, a good indicator of health, has fallen slightly over the last decade, from 75.7 years to 75.4 years for men.
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
Big Pharma Covid Vaccine Profiteers Profit From Taxpayers’s Money!” : Massive Public Investment Made COVID-19 Vaccines Possible In a new study published in the BMJ, Dr. Hussain Lalani and a team of six other medical researchers document the massive extent to which the US public (through the federal government) financed the development, production, and purchase of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Through March 2022, the US government spent at least $2.7 billion to develop and produce these vaccines. As the researchers note this is a conservative estimate. In addition to these investments in research and development, the US government spent $29.2 billion through March 2022 to purchase the COVID-19 vaccines—at about $20.69 per dose on average, far in excess of estimated manufacturing costs of $1 to $3 per dose—bringing total public investment to $31.9 billion.