Daily News Digest February 5, 2024
Images of the Day:
Climate, Capitalism. Profit, Greed
Israel’s History of Palestinian Genocide
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”
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: Austerity, Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, andThe 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:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. … The treatment of the aborigines was, naturally, most frightful in plantation-colonies destined for export trade only, such as the West Indies, and in rich and well-populated countries, such as Mexico and India, that were given over to plunder. But even in the colonies properly so called, the Christian character of primitive accumulation did not belie itself. Those sober virtuosi of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, in 1703, by decrees of their assembly set a premium of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured red-skin: in 1720 a premium of £100 on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts-Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following prices: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards £100 (new currency), for a male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners £50, for scalps of women and children £50. Some decades later, the colonial system took its revenge on the descendants of the pious pilgrim fathers, who had grown seditious in the meantime. At English instigation and for English pay they were tomahawked by red-skins. The British Parliament proclaimed bloodhounds and scalping as “means that God and Nature had given into its hand.” . . . If money … comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. — Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, Part VIII, Chapter 31, (the) Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist
The term ‘race’ entered English early in the 16th century, referring to family, lineage, and breed. In the 18th-century Enlightenment, the idea of race became incorporated into more systematic meditations on the nature of the world. ‘Imperialism, genocide, and the “science” of race’ explains how doctrines of race gained considerable strength with the growing slave trade, and how, in the 19th century, a range of theories emerged that explained all human variation on the basis of innate racial characteristics. The idea of nation also played a crucial role in the origins and development of racial thinking. The impact of imperialism, the rise of eugenics, social Darwinism, and the racial genocide of the Nazis are also outlined. —Imperialism, Genocide, and the ‘Science’ of Race
Podcasta/Videos of the Day:
Dearborn Mayor to Biden: “Lives of Palestinians Should Not Be Measured Simply in Poll Numbers”
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 ford 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
Palestinian Solidarity Protesters Rallied at Biden Campaign Event in Michigan “The lives of Palestinians should not be measured simply in poll numbers,” said Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud. President Biden faced protests in Michigan this week over his ongoing support for the Israeli assault on Gaza. Michigan is a crucial swing state that could prove decisive in this year’s presidential election and is also home to the largest percentage of Arab Americans in the United States. Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who refused to meet with Biden’s campaign manager last week, says it’s inappropriate to consider electoral politics as U.S. policy supports an ongoing genocide. “For us, the lives of Palestinians should not be measured simply in poll numbers,” Hammoud tells Democracy Now! We also speak with veteran pollster James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, who says the Biden team is “cut off from reality” if they believe people will forget their outrage over Gaza by the time of the November election. “The White House is taking for granted that they’ve got support — and they don’t,” says Zogby.
Ralph Nader: A Year Without Presidential Debates? Hell No! Here’s how citizens in six key U.S. cities could jumpstart democracy by organizing debates themselves and daring the candidates not show up. In 2004 author George Farah exposed the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) as a creation in 1987 of the Republican and Democratic Parties to take control away from the “uppity” League of Women Voters (LWV). The League had been the sponsor of presidential debates every four years. Farah’s book was titled No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates. Unless voters organize their own debates (about which more later), there may be no presidential debates this year. There won’t be 50 to 100 million viewers watching the debates, as there were in prior presidential election contests.
U.S. Funded Palestinian Genocide:
Capitalism: A Structural Genocide “The dominant class at the world level . . . has become the enemy of all humanity.” – Samir Amin, Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism? Garry Leech, an author who had previously penned a book on the FARC insurgency in Colombia (2011), has assembled a forceful denunciation of the status quo with Capitalism: A Structural Genocide. In essence, he argues cogently in this work that the devastating structural violence experienced by societies subjected to the rule of capital since its historical emergence – and that particularly felt by the world’s presently impoverished social majorities – is, instead of being an aberration or distortion of market imperatives, central and inherent to the division of society along class lines and the enthronement of private property. Even a cursory examination of the depth of human suffering perpetuated historically and contemporarily by the hegemony of capital should lead disinterested observers to agree with Leech that the catastrophic scale of violence for which this system is responsible can be considered nothing less than genocidal, however shocking such a conclusion might prove to be.
In Retaliation to the UN Court Determination that Israel was guilty of Genocide, these Countries, Canada,Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Estonia, Japan, Austria and Romania, have joined Washington as of Monday. Have suspended funding the The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The UNRWA was giving aid yothe people of Gaza. This, in iself, is act of Genocide!
As Palestinians Continue to Die, the History of Their Betrayal by the “Free World” Tells Us Why Have Arabs truly been the vitriolic antisemites of history that the media paints them as? Or have they actually been Europeans? Juan Cole and Robert Scheer discuss this historical issue and more on this episode of Scheer Intelligence. Juan Cole, a renowned history professor at the University of Michigan and expert on the Middle East and South Asia, joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast to tackle inconvenient truths ignored by the media in the history of Israel and Palestine. This includes the conflation that criticizing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is somehow a form of Holocaust denial. This view of history distorts and whitewashes the deep antisemitic history of Western European culture, Scheer and Cole argue.
Israel Bombed Belgian Aid Office in Gaza After Nation Refused to Halt UNRWA Funding “This is a direct result of the impunity Washington has provided Israel,” said one analyst. Belgian officials expressed outrage Thursday after Israeli forces reportedly bombed the office building of the Belgian Agency for Development Cooperation in the Gaza Strip, an attack that came after Belgium declined to join the U.S. and more than a dozen other countries in cutting off funding to the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency.
Palestinians Uncover Dozens Killed Execution-Style In Schoolyard In Gaza Palestinian Civilians Discovered Bodies Blindfolded And With Their Legs And Hands Tied Back. Dozens Of Bodies Of Palestinians Have Been Uncovered In A Mass Grave In A Schoolyard In Northern Gaza, With Witnesses Saying They Appeared To Have Been Killed “Execution Style” By Israeli Forces. A Human Rights Lawyer Has Said The Killings Are “Clearly A War Crime.”
Environment:
One of Many Ways to Begin to End Global Warming: Expose ‘Greenwashing’ — Tax the Polluters 100%! After World War II Rosa Luxenburg Coined the Slogan: ‘S0cialism or Barbaism’! Now the Slogan Should Be: ‘Ecosocialism or Ecocide’!
‘Climate Protesters Are Not the Criminals’: Case Against Greta Thunberg Thrown Out “The actual crime is committed by the very industries and companies we are acting against,” said Thunberg, one of five activists charged after protesting a fossil fuel industry summit in London.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
The Red Scare Overlapped With Another State-Sanctioned Panic: The Black Scare Rooted in white people’s fear of Black Nationalism, the Black Scare was conjoined with the anti-communist Red Scare.
The Lessons of the Montgomery Bus Boycot By Roland Sheppard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Addressing a Mass Meeting at First Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama
Why the Boycott Was Successful
- It had mass support and its strength developed from the unity of the Black masses to boycott the buses.
- In order to sustain the boycott, the MIA had organized an alternative transportation system, which gave the masses the ability to get to work for over a year, something that was crucial to the success of the boycott.
- The democratically organized Montgomery Improvement Association had regular weekly mass meetings of thousands to decide the strategy and tactics of the movement. The people in the struggle had control and the final say — not the leaders from on high. This helped to insured the power of the movement, for the masses saw the MIA as theirorganization and were committed by their votes to implement their tactics of both mass civil disobedience (the boycott) and self-defense by the MIA was key to the success of the struggle.
- They used the tactic of self-defense, From my conversations, prior to this forum, with E.D. Nixon and Clifton DeBerry, (1964 Presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party), who, along with Farrel Dobbs (1956 Presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party) helped organize the 1956 Stationwagons for Montgomery Campaign, it became clear to me, that the success of this transportation system was made possible by the Korean War GIs. They were able to use their experience in the army’s “motor pools” specifically and the army generally, to perform the maintenance of the automobiles and become the hard core of the drivers that sustained this transportation system for a year. It was also widely known, in Montgomery, that these men also had the ability and the willingness to defend themselves if the KKK attacked the transportation system. Due to the wide knowledge of this fact, and the world attention that the Boycott had achieved, the racists were unable to disrupt the carpool, that “worked with military precision.”
- The power of independent mass action, independent of the politicians, was demonstrated by the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This is the power that inspired and garnered support from throughout the nation and the world.
Labor:
‘Wars are Not an Effective Way to Create Jobs’!: Costs of War: U.S. Economy The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have contributed to significant economic setbacks in the United States, through lost opportunities for investment in public infrastructure and services and higher borrowing rates. Contrary to the widespread belief that war is a particularly effective way to create jobs, U.S. federal spending on the current wars would have led to at least 1.4 million more jobs had the money been invested instead in education, health care or green energy. Similarly, the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in military assets such as ships and aircraft during the first decade of the wars would have led to larger capital improvements had these dollars instead been invested in core public economic infrastructure, such as roads and water systems. The wars have also impacted interest rates charged to borrowers by banks and other creditors. This is the result of war spending financed entirely by debt, which has contributed to a higher ratio of national debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and subsequent rising long-term interest rates.
Economists Report That The United States is “No Longer In a Recssion”. But the Working Class has Been in a Recession Since the 2008 Crash!
Since June 2009 Americans have lived in the false reality of a recovering economy. Various fake news and manipulated statistics have been used to create this false impression. However, indicators that really count have not supported the false picture and were ignored. For example, it is normal in a recovering or expanding economy for the labor force participation rate to rise as people enter the workforce to take advantage of the job opportunities. During the decade of the long recovery, from June 2009 through December 2023, the labor force participation rate consistently fell from 65.7 to 62.5 percent. —Paul Craig Roberts, The Diminishing American Economy (Updated)
Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate is 62.5%
Economy:
World:
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