Daily News Digest January 4, 2021

The World’s Masses are in Dire Need a Redistribution  of the World’s Wealth! (A Socialis Revolution): Amid Warnings of Surging Worldwide Poverty, Planet’s 500 Richest People Added $1.8 Trillion to Combined Wealth in 2020 Bloomberg‘s year-end report on the wealth of the world’s billionaires shows that the richest 500 people on the planet added $1.8 trillion to their combined wealth in 2020, accumulating a total net worth of $7.6 trillion.  The Bloomberg Billionaires Index recorded its largest annual gain in the list’s history last year, with a 31% increase in the wealth of the richest people. The historic hoarding of wealth came as the world confronted the coronavirus pandemic and its corresponding economic crisis, which the United Nations last month warned is a “tipping point” set to send more than 207 million additional people into extreme poverty in the next decade—bringing the number of people living in extreme poverty to one billion by 2030. Even in the richest country in the world, the United States, the rapidly widening gap between the richest and poorest people grew especially stark in 2020. As Dan Price, an entrepreneur and advocate for fair wages, tweeted, the 500 richest people in the world amassed as much wealth in 2020 as “the poorest 165 million Americans have earned in their entire lives.” By Julia Conley

Daily News Digest Archives

Another Example Capitalism as a Failed System: World Capilalism Was Aware of the Danger of Cornovavirus Threat Over 4 Years 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 future of Humanity Is Now At stake!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”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!

Images  of the Day:

Capitalist Profiteers: More Passengers=More Profit! The Coronavirus SpreadersQuotes 0f the Day:

COVID-19 is a mirror, and while some steadfastly see only what they wish to see, the great preponderance of the population unavoidably beholds a bleak reflection indeed. Name an institution, and COVID has showed precisely where its long-standing flaws live: Politics, education, health care, labor. Name that which you have depended on, and you will find it dented, scarred and twisted by this lethal passage. Nothing remains untouched.  Capitalism, American-style, has handled this pandemic with almost seamless irresponsibility. COVID, like water, finds all the cracks and crannies, all the pinholes and rends, and pours through. Yet we remained open as a nation for all these long and infected months, plowing workers into meatpacking plants and retail stores because the machine of profit must be fed. Wealth must be extracted — this is the one and only law we have lived under for so long, and COVID is now the pyre upon which the conceits of almighty capitalism burn. The virus is the “Invisible Hand” Adam Smith never saw coming, and it has slapped down our conceits with effortless wrath. — COVID Put a Mirror Up to Our Society.

From The Media Monopoly: 2010 Update: In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. At the time, Ben Bagdikian was called “alarmist” for pointing this out in his book, The Media Monopoly. In his 4th edition, published in 1992, he wrote “in the U.S., fewer than two dozen of these extraordinary creatures own and operate 90% of the mass media”— controlling almost all of America’s newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, records, movies, videos, wire services and photo agencies. He predicted then that eventually this number would fall to about half a dozen companies. This was greeted with skepticism at the time. When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world’s largest media corporation. — Media Reform Iformation CenterVideos of the Day:

STIMU-LESS

US Has Entered Uncharted Territory in Uprising Against Racism

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 Reublicrats 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. Rax the Rich!  — They Can Afford To Pay

The Kafkaesque Imprisonment of Julian Assange Exposes U.S. Myths About Freedom and Tyranny The real measure of how free is a society is not how its mainstream, well-behaved ruling class servants are treated, but the fate of its actual dissidents. Persecution is not typically doled out to those who recite mainstream pieties, or refrain from posing meaningful threats to those who wield institutional power, or obediently stay within the lines of permissible speech and activism imposed by the ruling class. Those who render themselves acquiescent and harmless that way will — in every society, including the most repressive — usually be free of reprisals. They will not be censored or jailed. By Glen Greenwald

People in Debt Have Formed a Union to Fight Back The Debt Collective is urging President-elect Biden to cancel all student debt “because it’s the moral thing to do.” In November, Pennsylvania permitted the resumption of utility shutoffs during the pandemic. In advance, the local Debt Collective, which helps people dispute their debts and fight back against predatory fees, protested. The group helped organize a gathering of between 20 and 30 protesters in Philadelphia to demand the moratorium continue. “We are tired of this,” Pennsylvania Debt Collective organizer Lauren Horner told CBS. “We are tired of the greed displayed by these organizations.” Horner was referring to the Philadelphia Gas Works, the PECO Energy Company, and to what some in the Debt Collective regard as the negligence of the Public Utility Commission. By Eve OttenbergThe Media Monoply Consolidates: Horror as Hedge Fund Alden, Accused of ‘Bloodless Strip-Mining of American Newspapers,’ Moves to Buy Tribune Publishing “If you’re a shareholder and you have any concern for the future of this institution or the common good, please don’t sell to Alden Global Capital.” By Andrea GermanosEnvironment:

You Don’t Want to Imagine an Ocean Without Coral Reefs, But You Might Have to The average temperature in oceans has increased by 0.1 degrees Celsius (32.18 degrees Fahrenheit) in the past century as a result—among other factors—of increased use of fossil fuels. This increase in atmospheric warming, combined with phenomenon such as the 1997-98 and 2010 El Niño, have resulted in catastrophic coral reef degradation. But these earlier episodes do not compare to the impact of the long period of coral reef bleaching from 2014 to 2017; for example, the 1997-98 period saw the death of 16 percent of coral reefs, while the 2014-2017 warming saw 80 percent of the Great Barrier Reef suffer from severe bleaching. By Vijay PrashadNatural Disasters:Los Angeles is Riskiest US County But New Yorkers Should Beware Tornadoes —New Fema index considers exposure to natural disasters—East coast more vulnerable to twister damage than Oklahoma Los Angeles county is the riskiest county in the US, according to a new Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) index which considers 18 kinds of natural disasters, from earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes to floods, volcanoes and tsunamis.Civil Rights/Black Liberation:

Labor:

‘Raises From Coast to Coast in 2021’: New Year, Higher Minimum Wages in 24 States and 50 Municipalities Thanks to Fight for $15 “These increases are a testament to the power of workers coming together and fighting for what real people and families need.” 2020 was a devastating year for underpaid frontline workers.   But even in the face of public health and economic crises triggered by Covid-19, the Fight for $15 movement persisted, and now 24 states and 50 municipalities throughout the U.S. are set to raise minimum wages in 2021.  On New Year’s Day, 20 states and 32 cities will increase their minimum wage, with the wage floor in 27 of those jurisdictions reaching or exceeding $15 per hour. The January 1 raises will be followed by another round of wage floor hikes later in 2021, when four additional states and 18 localities will increase their minimum wage, 13 of them to at least $15 per hour. By Kenny StancilEconomy:

The Contagion of Capital Financialized Capitalism, COVID-19, and the Great Divide The U.S. economy and society at the start of 2021 is more polarized than it has been at any point since the Civil War. The wealthy are awash in a flood of riches, marked by a booming stock market, while the underlying population exists in a state of relative, and in some cases even absolute, misery and decline. The result is two national economies as perceived, respectively, by the top and the bottom of society: one of prosperity, the other of precariousness. At the level of production, economic stagnation is diminishing the life expectations of the vast majority. At the same time, financialization is accelerating the consolidation of wealth by a very few. Although the current crisis of production associated with the COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened these disparities, the overall problem is much longer and more deep-seated, a manifestation of the inner contradictions of monopoly-finance capital. Comprehending the basic parameters of today’s financialized capitalist system is the key to understanding the contemporary contagion of capital, a corrupting and corrosive cash nexus that is spreading to all corners of the U.S. economy, the globe, and every aspect of human existence. By John Bellamy FosterR. Jamil Jonna and Brett Clark

Forecast for 2021 This time last year, I started my post on the forecast for 2020 by making a distinction between predictions and forecasts.  I argued that we can make predictions that can be tested, say about the climate and global warming.  Climate scientists predict that if carbon emissions keep rising, then global temperatures will keep rising and eventually cause damaging changes in the earth’s climate (and it is happening). Indeed, virologists have been predicting for some time that there would be a wave of pandemics from new pathogens reaching humans. Similarly, in social sciences, we can make predictions, if with more difficulty. In Marxist economics we can make predictions from Marx’s law of accumulation of capital and from the law of tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The first law argues that the organic composition of capital will rise over time (and it does in capitalist economies); and the second law predicts that the average rate of profit on the stock of capital invested by capitalists will fall over time (and it does). By Michael RobertsWorld:New Challenges in South Africa’s Fight for Climate Justice Patrick Bond: The deaths of four frontline KwaZulu-Natal activists, and latest oil refinery explosion in Durban, define the battlegrounds in 2021 In a major analysis published by Climate & Capitalism today, Patrick Bond examines the strengths and weaknesses of oppositional climate politics in South Africa today. He pays tribute to four activists who died in late 2020, and argues that the movement’s key objective in the coming year must be the unity of environmental, community and potentially even labor movements. English Exceptionalism Is, In Fact, Unexceptional – Our Government is Making The Same Errors as Other Nationalist Movements The view from the top of the Western Heights, the great fortified hill overlooking Dover, has the advantage of taking in many of the key features shaping life in Britain in the age of Brexit and Covid-19. The most important of these is the proximity of the French coast, glittering on the horizon 22 miles away, a fact of geography that will continue to determine what happens in Britain more than any trade deal or withdrawal agreement with the EU.  If proof of this were needed, it was provided over Christmas by the devastating impact of the French ban on untested lorry drivers crossing the Channel in a bid to stop them spreading the new variant of the virus to France. The giant backlog of stranded trucks and trapped truck drivers graphically illustrated the dependence of Britain on unhampered links to continental Europe. By Patrick CockburnEducation, Health, Science, 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 

“Drugs Don’t Work If People Can’t Afford Them”: Big Pharma to Raise Prices of 300 Medications on Jan. 1 “The increases come as pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer are playing hero by developing vaccines for Covid-19 in record time.” As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, hospitalizations skyrocketed in 2020, but routine visits to the doctor’s office and demand for new prescription medications fell sharply during the worldwide lockdown. To make up for lost revenue, the pharmaceutical industry plans to ring in the New Year by raising prices on more than 300 drugs in the United States on January 1, according to an analysis by healthcare consulting firm 3 Axis Advisors, whose findings were summarized in an exclusive report published Thursday in Reuters. By Kenny Stancil