Daily News Digest November 15, 2019

Daily News Digest Achives

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 banner headline: “There Is No Peace” Could Still Be Published Today!

During This Economic Crisis, Capitalism’s Three Point Political Program: Austerity, Scapegoat Blacks, Minorities, and ‘Illegal’ Immigrants for Unemployment, and  The Iron Heel.

Always Remember That Obamba Supported the Wall Street Bailout and Remember That President Obama, With a Majority Democrat Legislature, Started the United States Capitalist Austerity Program  — The Race to the Botom or the 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 — The 99% Will Rule! — Not the Few!

Images of the Day:

Costs of War Project

Quotes of the Day:

The So-Called War on Terror Has Killed Over 801,000 People and Cost $6.4 Trillion: New Analysis “The numbers continue to accelerate, not only because many wars continue to be waged, but also because wars don’t end when soldiers come home.” The so-called War on Terror launched by the United States government in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks has cost at least 801,000 lives and $6.4 trillion according to a pair of reports published Wednesday by the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. By Jessica Corbett

Scientists working on the issue have often told me that, once upon a time, they assumed, if they did their jobs, politicians would act upon the information. That, of course, hasn’t happened. Anything but, across much of the planet. Worse yet, science failed to have the necessary impact in significant part because of disinformation promoted by the major fossil-fuel companies, which have succeeded in diverting attention from climate change and successfully blocking meaningful action. Much focus has been put on ExxonMobil’s history of disseminating disinformation, partly because of the documented discrepancies between what that company said in public about climate change and what its officials said (and funded) in private. Recently, a trial began in New York City accusing the company of misleading its investors, while Massachusetts is prosecuting ExxonMobil for misleading consumers as well. If only it had just been that one company, but for more than 30 years, the fossil-fuel industry and its allies have denied the truth about anthropogenic global warming. They have systematically misled the American people and so purposely contributed to endless delays in dealing with the issue by, among other things, discounting and disparaging climate science, mispresenting scientific findings, and attempting to discredit climate scientists. These activities are documented in great detail in How Americans Were Deliberately Misled about Climate Change, a report I recently co-authored, as well as in my 2010 book and 2014 film, Merchants of Doubt. — The Greatest Scam in History Is Taking Us All Down

Gary Mantle, chief executive of Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, said: “This unnoticed apocalypse should set alarms ringing. We have put at risk some of the fundamental building blocks of life. But insects and other invertebrates can recover quickly if we stop killing them and restore the habitats they require to thrive. We all need to take action now in our gardens, parks, farms, and places of work.” The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times.Insect population collapses have been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, and the first global scientific review, published in February, said widespread declines threaten a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”. — Insect Apocalypse’ Poses Risk To All Life On Earth, Conservationists Warn

Videos Of the Day: 

White Nationalists (Racists-R.S.) Are Running the White House

Sea Level Rise Could Be Three Times Worse Than Previous Estimates A new study and mapping visualization tool by the organization Climate Central says hundreds of millions more people than previously thought live in coastal flooding risk zones.

U.S.:

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.

 US ‘War on Terror’ Has Killed Over 801,000 People at Cost of $6.4 Trillion  “The numbers continue to accelerate, not only because many wars continue to be waged, but also because wars don’t end when soldiers come home.” The so-called War on Terror launched by the United States government in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks has cost at least 801,000 lives and $6.4 trillion according to a pair of reports published Wednesday by the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. By Jessica Corbett US and Corporations Key Factors Behind Most Violent Year Yet in Mexico This year has been the most violent year on record for Mexico, with almost 26,000 intentional homicides between January and September. Following the murder of nine US citizens last week, US president Donald Trump offered to send the US army to “help” fight drug cartels in Mexico. The comment lacked awareness of the already disastrous outcomes of the so-called “war on drugs” in Mexico and of the role the US and transnationals have played in fomenting the levels of human rights abuses here.Murder rates are up by 2.4% compared to the same period last year, despite President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) swearing in last December. As the US itself heads into an election year, any criminalization of Mexicans should be countered with a profound understanding of the impact of US foreign and economic policy in the country. By Tamara Pearson

Mexico’s LeBaron Massacre and the War That Will Not Cease Murder by organized crime, the presumed culprit, is the stuff of daily news here since the drug war was launched in late 2006. But the massacre of women and children, members of a powerful and well-known agribusiness family, in a remote area on the border of Chihuahua and Sonora where they have lived for a century, on the surface makes no sense. A crime this notorious, involving US citizens, brings down major binational heat on a drug cartel, something they normally try to avoid. Information has been confused and contradictory, The Secretary of Public Security and Protection, Arturo Durazo, stated the day after, Nov. 5, that it could be a case of mistaken identity. Media and social media have rejected the claim, and with good reason. Over the years, the “mistaken identity” or “it was an accident” motive in Mexican forensics has become shorthand for “we’d rather not talk about this”. We saw it in the 1993 killing of the Catholic Cardenal Posadas, and the inexplicably high number of cases of security forces and high-level government officials who have fallen from the sky. By Laura Carlsen

Peak Hubris “Hubris” is defined as rash and foolish pride, a dangerous overconfidence, manifested with arrogance.  The Deep State vaunts our “exceptionalism”, and since Reagan’s “City on a HIll” trope Americans have been assured by all succeeding Presidents that ours is the “indispensible nation”. The word describes the way America sells itself to the world, and has for generations. The yawning cognitive gap between our nomenklatura’s relentless self-promotion and its pathetic history of botched, humiliating failures in every single act of Imperial overreach, demands examination.  Are we at Peak Hubris?  When exactly should the hubris of a vicious, lying, sloganeering criminal state be identified as what it is, a cover for unhinged stupidity? Viz. the deranged, hysterical Democratic Party, a subsidiary of the Deep State, led–if that term applies–by a geriatric clutch of morally squalid throwbacks and vacuous nonentities, which has its Depends in a knot in the effort to blame the entire debacle of recent U.S. historic crime on the repulsive Yahoo squatting in the White House.  As Einstein observed, all explanations should be as simple as possible…but no simpler. By Paul Edwards

Labor:

Economy:

Shadow Government Statistics Alternate Inflation Charts The CPI chart on the home page reflects our estimate of inflation for today as if it were calculated the same way it was in 1990. The CPI on the Alternate Data Series tab here reflects the CPI as if it were calculated using the methodologies in place in 1980. In general terms, methodological shifts in government reporting have depressed reported inflation, moving the concept of the CPI away from being a measure of the cost of living needed to maintain a constant standard of living. Further definition is provided in our  CPI Glossary. Further background on the SGS-Alternate CPI series is available in our Public Comment on Inflation Measurement.

The Fed Has Created the Big Lie for Congress on its Repo Loans while the New York Fed Blocks Freedom of Information Requests Yesterday Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell testified before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. Only one Congressman, Kenny Marchant (R-TX), had the courage to ask Powell about the Fed’s intervention in the repo loan market beginning on September 17. Since that time the Fed has been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars each week (that the New York Fed creates electronically out of thin air) into its 24 primary dealers on Wall Street. These primary dealers are not commercial banks that might be inclined to use the funds to make loans to local businesses or to consumers to buy a house and help their local economies. No, 23 of the 24 primary dealers are stock brokerage firms and investment banks that engage in leveraged bets in the stock, bond, commodities, and derivatives markets. The 24^th is a foreign bank. (See primary dealer list below.) By Pam Martens and Russ MartensJPMorgan Has Radically Changed Its Balance Sheet, Shrinking Its Cash at the Fed by $145 BillionJPMorgan Chase is not a bank that federal regulators can simply put on autopilot and hope for the best. When the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations conducted a formal probe into how the bank lost $6.2 billion of its federally-insured bank’s deposits by gambling in derivatives in London in 2012, the Chair of the subcommittee, former Senator Carl Levin, said that the bank had “piled on risk, hid losses, disregarded risk limits, manipulated risk models, dodged oversight, and misinformed the public.” Over the past five years, the bank has admitted to three criminal felony charges brought by the U.S. Department of Justice and is currently under an ongoing criminal probe by federal prosecutors over charges that its traders ran an eight-year criminal enterprise out of its precious metals trading desk in New York. By Pam Martens and Russ MartensWorld:

Race is Central to Both Revolution and Reaction in Latin American The world birthed in the near extinction of one-fifth of humanity still exists, in the social relations bequeathed to the Americas by
conquistadors and enslavers. The world birthed in the near extinction of one-fifth of humanity still exists, in the social relations bequeathed to the Americas by conquistadors and enslavers. “In Latin America, U.S. influence means White Power.”The events in Bolivia lay bare the central role that racial subjugation has always played in the “New World,” a hemisphere whose “discovery” by Europeans resulted — within the span of only 50 years — in the death by genocide and pandemic of fully a fifth of the Earth’s human population. The Conquistadors frenzied “primitive accumulation” of precious metals, mined by enslaved Natives who died quicker than they could be replenished, created a demand for the capture and importation of millions of Africans with immunities to both European and tropical disease. For centuries, until deep into the 1700s, the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere’s population was Indigenous and Black, with African slaves comprising the great bulk of newcomers to the New World. Thus was laid the material basis for the rise of Europe, the beginnings of capitalism and the global supremacy of whiteness.By Glen Ford, Black Agenda Reprot executive editor

Spain: PSOE-UP coalition government – a risky step full of dangers The 10 November Spanish elections have left a more unstable situation than the 28 April elections. Although the right has been defeated again, the PSOE leadership failed in its political calculation that it would emerge strengthened, and the tactics of the UP leadership – to ruin Sanchez’s investiture and risk new elections – were also an error that lost them votes and seats. Political polarisation, agitated by the Catalan national question, is reflected in the strengthening of the extreme right, of Catalan independence parties, and Basque and Galician nationalism.

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 ‘govern’, pass universal healthcare for themselves, but they cannot spend even one trillion dollars for universal health for those who are ‘governed’! This is what is considered, by the powers the to be,  a democracy and part of the democratic way. — Roland Sheppard, Let the People  Vote on Healthcare