Daily News Digest September 13, 2024
Images of the Day:
Movie Review: 911 Dust and Deceit at the WTC
9-11 World Trade Center Dust Cloud: How Many Will Die?! 
The “dustification” and the implosion of the World Trade Center (WTC) towers sent clouds of carcinogenic dust across New York City. These towers were built in the late 1970s and asbestos was one of many carcinogenic materials that were used in their construction. Everyone familiar with construction and the carcinogens that are contained in high rise structures, immediately knew that there was a grave risk for all who were downwind from the dust cloud which was formed from the burning and crumbling of the building. Despite the obvious, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Christie Whitman said a week after the attacks: “I am glad to reassure the people of New York … that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink.” In the Friday, January 11, 2002 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, there was a reprint of a Washington Post article titled “The Residents Near Ground Zero Worry About Toxic Debris,” which explains the initial effects of the dust cloud upon those who live downwind from the WTC towers. The article, in explaining some of the after effects of the dust cloud, stated: “… those who live or work downtown report strikingly similar symptoms: nosebleeds, sore throats, bronchial infections and an endless hacking cough .… About one-fourth of the city’s firefighters have complained of severe coughing after working at ground zero, and more than a thousand have filed notices of claims against the city.”
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”There is No Democracy! When Less Than 1% Control the Wealth, Production, and Price of Everything Produced and Consumed in the World! In the present period of unfettered Capitalism, the pretense of democratic rule does not exist, except in the minds of ‘socialists’ like Bernie Sanders and the Labor Bureaucracy! Capitalists view all struggles as struggles against capitalist rule! Transition demands immediately become revolutionary demands! Therefore, any resistence to the attack of capitalists has to be organized by those that understand this! 
Today, the United States Capitalists are Consolidating Themselves as the Supreme Capitalists! Capitalism’s Gluttony is Demonstrated by It’s Quest for More and More Profits at the Expense of Humanity! The Rise of Capitalism was Under the Banner of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity! Now There is Less Liberty, More Inequality, and Less Fraternity of Humanity! Every Day, From Global Warming to Global War There is a New Example of Capitalism in Imperialist Decay!
Capitalism as a Failed System: World Capitalism Has Been Aware of the Comming Catastrophe of Global Warming Over 6 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 Five Horsemen of the the Apocalypse, Spreading Racism, War, Famine, Pestilence, Death, and Misinformation! 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, and 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! Globaly, With the Current Gaza War, The Right of Assembly is Under Attack! Due to Years of Austerity, Cuts to Public Health Care, And An Anti-Science and Profiteering President, The United States Still Leads the World In Coronavirus Cases and Deaths in the World!
The Majority of the World, Despite the Media Monopoly’s Lies, are Opposed to the Palestinian Genocide and Global Warming — The 1% Minority Funds Them! At, this Time in History, Capitalism is Exposing the Fact That it is Opposed to Majority Rule/Democracy!
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:
CATE JENKINS, PhD, a 22-year specialist with the EPA’s Hazardous Waste Identification Division and the author of a 432-page memo to the EPA’s Inspector General as background documentation for the recently released IG report.On January 11, 2002, a memorandum was sent by Cate Jenkins, Ph.D., the head EPA hazardous waste investigator in lower Manhattan after 9/11. This memorandum compared the asbestos levels in the Montana, Libby Hazardous Waste Superfund Site* to the levels she found in Lower Manhattan. (In Libby, Montana almost 30% of the Libby residents were hurt by asbestos.) — 9-11 World Trade Center Dust Cloud: How Many Will Die?!
What the borders are mostly protecting is stolen wealth and stolen land and the insecurity that comes with knowing that the theft was unjust. They Are a Process, Not a Place. From Europe to the US, politicians are expanding the violence of border policing and scapegoating migrants. — Borders Are Drawn to Protect Stolen Wealth.
Podcasts/Vide0s of the Day:
The Chris Hedges Report: The Liberal Class’s Ultimate Betrayal (w/ Jimmy Dore) Our political class does not govern. It entertains. It plays its assigned role in our fictitious democracy, howling with outrage to constituents and selling them out. The Squad and the Progressive Caucus have no more intention of fighting for universal health care, workers’ rights or defying the war machine than the Freedom Caucus fights for freedom. These political hacks are modern versions of Sinclair Lewis’s slick con artist Elmer Gantry, cynically betraying a gullible public to amass personal power and wealth. This moral vacuity provides the spectacle, as H.G. Wells wrote, of “a great material civilization, halted, paralyzed.” It happened in Ancient Rome. It happened in Weimar Germany. It is happening here. Governance exists. But it is not seen. It is certainly not democratic. It is done by the armies of lobbyists and corporate executives, from the fossil fuel industry, the arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street. Governance happens in secret. Corporations have seized the levers of power. Growing obscenely rich, the ruling oligarchs have deformed national institutions, including state and federal legislatures and the courts, to serve their insatiable greed. They know what they are doing. They understand the depths of their own corruption. They know they are hated. They are prepared for that too. They have militarized police forces and have built a vast archipelago of prisons to keep the unemployed and underemployed in bondage. All the while, they pay little to no income tax and exploit sweatshop labor overseas. They lavishly bankroll the political clowns who speak in the vulgar and crude idiom of an enraged public or in the dulcet tones used to mollify the liberal class. And when they see one of their political puppets faltering, as Joe Biden was, they step in to cut off the funds and stage a party coup.
The Debate Was Two Assholes Bragging About What Murderous Empire Sluts They Are Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): If you missed the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, this was pretty much the tone of it: Trump: She’s a communist. She’s literally a Marxist. Harris: Actually Goldman Sachs loves me. Trump:…
Black Agenda Radio September 6, 2024
Curbfest for Political Prisoners
Glen Ford: Say Political Prisoners Names While They Still Live
Tennessee Ride Share Workers Protest Uber and Lyft Labor Practices
AOC and the Desperate Democrats Attempt to Undermine the Greens
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 : My own Government, I cannot be Silent. ― Martin Luther King Jr.
To this day, we have a government and state apparatus that is designed to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Democracy for white and wealthy men only! — Roland Sheppard, My Forefathers and The 1%’s Forefathers.
US Scuttled Peace Agreement for War!: Victoria Nuland Appears to Confirm Key Moment When Peace Deal Was Scuttled in Ukraine Relitigating these details two years later cannot be dismissed as an exercise in political archeology. More than two years later, the war drags on with no end in sight. Victoria Nuland, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and one of the principal architects of the Biden administration’s Russia policy, has now opined on what is perhaps the foggiest episode in a war distinguished by a nearly impenetrable kind of diplomatic opacity: the April 2022 Istanbul peace talks between Russia and Ukraine. Furthermore she acknowledges that there was a deal on the table and that Western powers didn’t like conditions that would have limited Ukraine’s military arsenal, lending credence to the theory that Ukraine’s supporters had a hand in ultimately scuttling it. To be sure, neither the topic nor the content of Nuland’s comments is new. She is but the latest in a cavalcade of high-profile insiders, including former Israeli Prime Minister Nafatli Bennett and Ukrainian politician Davyd Arakhamia, whose testimony has shed light on the external pressures possibly informing the Zelenskyy government’s fateful decision to pull the plug on Turkish-brokered talks surrounding a draft treaty that would have ended the Ukraine war.
Plane Downed at Ndola: A UN Self-Portrait The night of 17-18 September 2024 will mark the 63rd anniversary of the death in a plane crash near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) of the second United Nations Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld and fifteen other people, UN staff and the plane’s crew. They were on a crucial UN mission to the newly independent Congo, where Hammarskjöld was to meet Moïse Tshombe, leader of secessionist Katanga province who was lavishly backed by Western political and mining interests, and negotiate the withdrawal of Belgian troops and deployment of UN peacekeepers. A large amount of circumstantial evidence screams murder, but the UN isn’t screaming at all, even though eleven of its staff, plus five Swedish crew members of DC6 flight SE-BDY were killed. Most speculation about what happened that night tends to focus on events in Congo, who killed Hammarskjöld, and why. But important questions about the United Nations itself are mostly left unraised, and the immediate and ongoing consequences of what amounts to an international coverup are largely unexplored. There are also other painfully significant but glossed-over questions about what Dag Hammarskjöld stood for, and what happened to his projects after his death.
The Unites States Media Monopoly
How Corporate News Has Tried to Numb Americans to the Horrors in Gaza As the Gaza war enters its 12th month with no end in sight, the ongoing horrors continue to be normalized in U.S. media and politics. The process has become so routine that we might not recognize how omission and distortion have constantly shaped views of events since the war began in October.
United States Funded Genocide in Israel:
Environmanet:
Fund Climate! — Not Genocide! 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’!
We Must Hold These Monsters to Account!
Ecosocialism 2020: From Rebellion to Revolution. Capitalism is sending humanity and the planet on a collision course towards ecocide. The COVID-19 pandemic is highlighting just how deadly agribusiness, deforestation and the unending pursuit of private profit really is. It has also shown that governments can move fast when they need to: social safety nets have been put in place — albeit temporary ones — including those we were always told “we could not afford”. Meanwhile, climate change continues to wreak havoc, with out-of-control fires on the west coast of the United States, and devastating bushfires in the Amazon, India, Africa and, again, in Australia. The Coalition federal government’s handpicked COVID-19 commission is pushing a dangerous gas-fired COVID-19 economic recovery, at the urging of the fossil fuel lobby and in spite of a global glut. It makes the fight for the necessary transition to sustainable energy and jobs a lot harder — despite overwhelming public opinion in its favour. Capitalism has broken what existed for millennia: the equilibrium between humans and nature. Now, we face a growing and dangerous metabolic rift between humanity and the ecosystem. As high school climate campaigner Greta Thunberg said: “Our current system is not ‘broken’ – the system is doing exactly what it’s supposed and designed to be doing. It can no longer be ‘fixed’. We need a new system.” Ecosocialism 2020 will look at capitalist globalization, how the Global South has been robbed and the ecological crisis. It will also look at how we can campaign for an alternative ecosocialist future — a return to a collectivist society based on the global Indigenous values of egalitarianism, cooperation and co-existing with nature.
The Following is From Counterpunch. To Them, the Left is the Democratic Party ‘Left’: A Left That Doesn’t Take the Lead in the Fight Against the Climate Crisis Has No Reason to Exist What follows is not addressed to the right and its supporters (economic, social and other) who – unfortunately – are doing their job very well. What follows is addressed above all to the left, which – unfortunately – is not doing its job at all well… Here’s what we wrote this time last year, just after the terrible floods in Thessaly, in an unfinished and unpublished text: “The shock of the two successive “Mediterranean hurricanes” Daniel and Elias was strong enough to cause the first strong tremors in the climate-skeptical beliefs of the Greeks. Of course, these are only the first cracks, which will only widen if there is the follow-up that circumstances demand from the only political force that can, potentially, not only scientifically explain the climate catastrophe but also act massively and concretely to deal with it.”
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
US steps up anti-Russia Campaign, Takes Black Socialist Uhuru Group to Trial in Florida By Malik Miah and Barry Sheppard
Hands off Uhuru! 
Washington has said for some time that Russia and China are its two main enemies.The U.S. anti-Russian campaign took a big leap forward when it put on trial the leader and activist supporters of a Florida-based Black socialist and Pan-Africanist groups on trial September 2, and a few days later “announced a broad effort to push back on Russian influence campaigns in the 2024 election, as it tries to curb the Kremlin’s use of state-run media and fake news sites to sway American voters,” according to the New York Times.The attack on the Florida-based group began years ago, long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 when the US and its European NATO allies applied massive sanctions against Russia and sent billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine. Omali Yeshitela, longtime chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), also known as the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, along with white supporters Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel, were indicted in 2023 for allegedly working on behalf of Russia in a multiyear foreign “malign influence campaign” in the United States.
Missouri Supreme Court Restores Abortion Rights Ballot Initiative “Anti-abortion opponents are trying everything to keep abortion rights questions away from voters—but their dirty tricks keep failing,” said one campaigner. Reproductive freedom defenders on Tuesday cheered the Missouri Supreme Court’s restoration of an abortion rights referendum—one of numerous 2024 ballot initiatives seeking to codify access to the healthcare procedure in states from coast to coast. Missouri’s highest court overturned Cole County Judge Christopher Limbaugh’s ruling removing Amendment 3—also known as the Right to Reproductive Freedom initiative—from the November 5 ballot. Limbaugh ordered Republican Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who decertified the measure on Monday, to place it back on the ballot.
Labor:
Economy:
The Fed Just Kicked the Capital Increases for the Dangerous Megabanks and their Derivatives Down the Road for Years When the next megabank blows up from its derivative exposure, you can add the names Jamie Dimon and Patick McHenry to former Republican Congressmen Randy Hultgren and Kevin Yoder as four of the men who greased the skids for another derivatives banking crisis. (For our report on the role played by Hultgren and Yoder, see our 2021 report here.) Dimon and McHenry are the latest lead players in the disastrous history of derivative regulation in the U.S. Dimon is the Chair and CEO of the riskiest and largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase. After his bank lost $6.2 billion gambling in derivatives in London in 2012 – using deposits from his federally-insured bank – Dimon would, to rational minds, seem like the least qualified candidate to be giving advice to his banking regulators on how much capital megabanks need to hold to offset their gargantuan trading and derivatives risks. (See All the Devils from 2008 Are Back at the Megabanks: Leverage, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, Over $192 Trillion in Derivatives, Shaky Capital Levels.)
World:
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