Daily News Digest March 4, 2020

                                      Another Example of a Failed System:                                      World Capilalism Was Aware of the Danger of Cornovavirus Threat a Year Ago and Did Nothing!

Daily News Digest Archives

Laura Gray’s cartoon from the front page of The Militant August 18, 1945, under banner headline: “There Is No Peace”

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!

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 , thet the 99% Will Rule, Not the Few!

Quotes of the Day:

As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labour by the working class itself. — Frederick Engles

. . . I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…  The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. . . . ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

This is a Case Where in Economic Terms The Cure Is Almost Worse Than The Disease’: Virus Outbreak Has Earmarks of a Global Economic Crisis

Videos of the Day:

A ssange Extradition: Political Persecution for Journalism? Julian Assange’s extradition hearings have finally begun in London, and his defense has the burden of showing that the US case is an act of political persecution.

New Documentary Explores Five Largely Unknown Truths about Israel/Palestine

California Agrees to Pay $53 Million for Neglecting Black and Brown Students California parents and teachers won the settlement by arguing that literacy is a constitutional right. The generational neglect of schools in communities of color shows ‘separate but equal’ is still the norm in California public schools

Trump Voters Aren’t Scared of Bernie—They’re Scared of His Base

Images of the Day:

The World Needs Decent Housing Housing!

 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.

Capitalism Can’t Give Us Affordable Housing Under capitalism, housing provision is based on what will make developers, lenders, and landlords rich — not what average people need to survive. That’s why we’ll never get decent, affordable housing for everyone under the free market. By Robbie Nelson

NEW YORK – APRIL 14: An interior view of a model condominium at the benefit for “Rosie’s Broadway Kids,” at the sales center for Platinum luxury condominiums April 14, 2008 in New York City. (Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images)

Class: The Little Word the Elites Want You to Forget Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx grounded their philosophies in the understanding that there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the rest of us. The interests of the rich are not our interests. The truths of the rich are not our truths. The lives of the rich are not our lives. Great wealth not only breeds contempt for those who do not have it but it empowers oligarchs to pay armies of lawyers, publicists, politicians, judges, academics and journalists to censure and control public debate and stifle dissent. Neoliberalism, deindustrialization, the destruction of labor unions, slashing and even eliminating the taxes of the rich and corporations, free trade, globalization, the surveillance state, endless war and austerity — the ideologies or tools used by the oligarchs to further their own interests — are presented to the public as natural law, the mechanisms for social and economic progress, even as the oligarchs dynamite the foundations of a liberal democracy and exacerbate a climate crisis that threatens to extinguish human life. By Chris Hedges

Pence Hates Science. Tasking Him With Coronavirus Response Could Cost Lives. The world has been watching the encroachment of the coronavirus closely ever since it emerged from Wuhan, China. Tens of thousands have been infected in 56 countries and counting, some of them lethally, and the virus appears to have a talent for evading even the most authoritarian quarantines. Supply lines out of China began to tremble, and then to quake, and then to break, until the global economy itself has begun to shake. It is telling, then, that the first real notice Donald Trump took of the progress of the disease came after the stock market began tanking while he was in India. Put another way, he only started paying attention after capitalism caught the coronavirus, and the economic symptoms have since grown worse.Environment:

Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:

Black Agenda Radio for Week of March 2, 2020  With Nellie Bailey And Glen Ford

  •  Black Scholar Praises Heroes and Indicts “Scoundrels” of McCarthy Era The peace activists that were persecuted in the McCarthy era were not fighting just for the absence of war, but were “anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and demanded an end to United States policing of the world,” said Charisse Burden-Stelly, professor of Africana Studies and political science at Carleton College. The exemplars of this struggle were W.E.B. Dubois, Paul Robeson and Claudia Jones, “Peace was construed as a Soviet ploy to undermine the American way of life,” said Burden-Stelly. Sound familiar?

  • “Respectable” Black Women Fought Mass Incarceration Back in the days when 90 percent of southern prison inmates were Black, socially conservative Black clubwomen fought for prison reform, believing that “putting Black women in jail was hurting the Black community,” said Nikki Brown, professor of history at the University of New Orleans. The National Association of Colored Women, who practiced what we today call “respectability” politics, played a key role in creating alternatives to incarceration, said Brown, who authored an article titled, “Keeping Black Motherhood Out of Prison: Prison Reform and Woman-Saving in the Progressive Era.”

  • If the Left Doesn’t Critique Endless War, Who Will? “We must raise the issues of war and imperialism in electoral politics in this country,” even if the Democrats don’t, said BAR senior columnist Margaret Kimberley, speaking at the annual conference of UNAC, the United National Anti-War Coalition. “In the debates, foreign policy is discussed very little, and when it is they all sound the same, even those who are supposed to be progressive,” said Kimberley.

Labor:

Economy:

 ‘This is a Case Where in Economic Terms The Cure Is Almost Worse Than The Disease’: Virus Outbreak Has Earmarks of a Global Economic Crisis The coronavirus outbreak began to look more like a worldwide economic crisis Friday as anxiety about the disease emptied shops and amusement parks, canceled events, cut trade and travel and dragged already slumping financial markets even lower. By The coronavirus outbreak began to look more like a worldwide economic crisis Friday as anxiety about the disease emptied shops and amusement parks, canceled events, cut trade and travel and dragged already slumping financial markets even lower. More employers told their workers to stay home, and officials locked down neighborhoods and closed schools. The wide-ranging efforts to halt the spread of the illness threatened jobs, paychecks and profits. “This is a case where in economic terms the cure is almost worse than the disease,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “When you quarantine cities … you lose economic activity that you’re not going to get back.’ More employers told their workers to stay home, and officials locked down neighborhoods and closed schools. The wide-ranging efforts to halt the spread of the illness threatened jobs, paychecks and profits. “This is a case where in economic terms the cure is almost worse than the disease,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “When you quarantine cities … you lose economic activity that you’re not going to get back.’ By  This is a case where in economic terms the cure is almost worse than the disease,” Adam Geller, Paul Wiseman and Christopher Rugaber

Shadow Government Statistics Flash Update No. 25

  • A Rough Couple of Weeks for Stocks, While Physical Gold and the Swiss Franc Held Their Own

  • Third-Quarter 2019 Gross Domestic Income Growth (Theoretical GDP Equivalent) Just Revised Lower to 1.2% from 2.1%, Due to Employment/Payroll Revisions; Negative GDP Revisions Keep Lining Up for the July 30th Benchmarking

  • Fourth-Quarter 2019 Quarterly Declines in Real Retail Sales and Manufacturing, and Deepening Annual Collapse in Freight Activity, All Preceded the Coronavirus Crisis

  • FOMC NEEDS TO CUT INTEREST RATES NOW: Underlying Consumer Fundamentals and Activity Continue to Suffer, Separate from Any Pandemic Considerations

  • Pre-Pandemic Consumer Financial Woes Reflect Excessive 2017-2018 Rate Hikes, Complicated by Insufficient, Subsequent FOMC Rate-Relief Easing

  • Yet, Wall Street and the Fed Chairman Have Claimed the Consumer Economy Continues to Boom, that the Consumer is Financially Healthy and Happy

  • Unfolding Pandemic Now Gives the Fed a Headline Excuse for Easing, Without Having to Admit to its Own Economic/Monetary-Policy Malfeasance

Central Bankers Can’t Save Us This Time There is a time for scientists and carefully vetted facts and a time for men who tell the public that everything is great, nothing to see here. It’s clearly a time for the former and less delusional chatter from the latter. The latest magical thinking is that if Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin get on a phone call this morning with the other G7 finance ministers and central bank governors, they can seduce or strongarm the group to announce rate cuts or fiscal stimulus to keep stock markets from further steep declines and GDP from contracting. (For how this played out previously, we recommend Nomi Prins’ brilliant book, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World.) By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

World:

Push Review – Searing Study of the Global Housing Crisis The real villain in the affordable-housing emergency is not avocado-eating creatives but the financial elites, according to this sobering documentary. Don’t blame gentrification for pushing the poor out of inner cities. That’s the message of this plausible investigative documentary from Swedish journalist Fredrik Gertten, who zooms out to take a global view of rising rents. The real villain in the affordable-housing crisis, his argument goes, is not avocado-eating young creatives but the financial elites. And Gertten does a decent job of delivering an economics lesson, explaining the complexities of the “financialisation” of residential real estate; most politicians, apparently, just don’t get it.  At the heart of the film is Leilani Farha, a Canadian human rights lawyer working as the UN’s special rapporteur on adequate housing. With her hippy haircut and activist approach of getting stuck in, she flies around the world talking to people affected by rising housing costs. In London, she meets Grenfell survivors and takes a tour of a former council estate torn down to make way for new luxury housing, which has been sold to investors in Hong Kong and Singapore. In Berlin, a baker has his rent put up by €600 a month. By Cath Clarke

Donald Trump  and Boris Johnson are Another Example of Capitalism in the Epoch Decay: Britain: Boris’ “Misfits And Weirdos” Take Control In Downing Street  The Tory Party and British government are being transformed under Boris Johnson’s leadership and Dominic Cumming’s influence. And big business is increasingly alarmed by the direction in which things are headed. By Rob Sewell

 Health, Science, 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 ‘governn’, 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! 

United $tates Health Care $ysten: ‘Why Are We Being Charged?’ Surprise Bills From Coronavirus Testing Spark Calls for Government to Cover All Costs “Huge surprise medical bills [are] going to make sure people with symptoms don’t get tested. That is bad for everyone.” Public health advocates, experts, and others are demanding that the federal government cover coronavirus testing and all related costs after several reports detailed how Americans in recent weeks have been saddled with exorbitant bills following medical evaluations.  By Jake Johnson