Daily News Digest July 23, 2021
Images of the Day:
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:
Gunboat Diplomacy: Foreign policy that is supported by the use or threat of military force.
“Methane is 84 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and New Mexico’s wells are leaking at an alarming rate.” — Sandra Steingraber
Capitalism Ia a Threat to Life Itself
Videos of the Day:
The Pandemic Is Not Over: Science Writer Ed Yong on Delta’s Devastation in Low-Vaccination States
Amnesty Int’l Calls for Moratorium on Private Spyware After Israeli NSO Group Pegasus Revelations
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 ownershipof the Reublicrats, who profit from war and the war budget, voted 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 To Pay!
Biden’s ‘Gunboat Diplomacy’: Biden Promised Diplomacy, But He’s Overseeing Military Buildup Against China Shortly after Joe Biden took office, the president delivered a speech at the U.S. Department of State, declaring, “I want the world to hear today: America is back…. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy…. By leading with diplomacy, we must also mean engaging our adversaries and our competitors diplomatically, where it’s in our interest, and advance the security of the American people.” instead of de-escalation with China, we are witnessing an enormous U.S. military buildup through massive military exercises in the Pacific.
Holding Onto the Cold War The United States cannot escape the consequences of the Cold War. The Cold War has shaped our political culture, our political institutions, and our national priorities. The Second World War ended 75 years ago, but we still outspend the entire global community on defense; control an overseas military infrastructure with more than 700 bases and facilities; and allocate tens of billions of dollars annually to nuclear forces. Now add the absurdity of the Space Command.
Profiteering Healthcare System’ Blamed as US Medical Debt Surges to $140 Billion One critic said the new estimate of medical debt in collections shows the for-profit healthcare system is “working just the way the corporate price gougers want it to.” A new study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that people in the United States now owe collection agencies a staggering $140 billion due to unpaid medical bills—making healthcare the nation’s largest source of debt in collections.
Ralph Nader: The Power Structure for Deadly Lag The climate crisis is the result of just one of many “deadly lags” that are evidence of the brutish power of the corporations over the innocents. Fifty years ago, medical research warned about the overuse of antibiotics creating mutations of resistant bacterium, making these drugs less effective. Dr. Sidney Wolfe warned about this criminal negligence again and again, along with other colleagues. But the drug companies kept over-promoting to get physicians to over-prescribe. Today, antibiotic resistance takes over 100,000 lives a year just in the U.S. Some bacterium are mutating beyond the ability of medical science to catch up with new more powerful antibiotics to curb new antibiotic resistance bacterium.
Extreme Wealth Concentration: Billionaire Space Race Is a Wake-up Call Bored billionaires want tax breaks to escape a planet they helped pollute. Should we even let them back?
Bootleg Fire Has Burned Over 364,000 Acres and Is Making Its Own Weather “Normally the weather predicts what the fire will do,” said an Oregon official. “In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do.”
Environment:
Obviously, Capitalism’s Media Monopoly Does Not Think Humanity’s Future Is Important!: Bezos’s Space Stunt Got Almost as Much TV Time as Climate Crisis in All of 2020 Broadcast news networks are notoriously bad at covering the climate crisis, dedicating a vanishingly small amount of airtime — year after year — to the grave existential threat despite the many potential stories they could be running about it. Their neglect of the climate crisis is on stark display in a new statistic: According to Media Matters for America, morning TV shows spent nearly as much time on Jeff Bezos’s space launch on July 20, 2021 as they did on the climate crisis in all of 2020.
Global Warming: Planning Not Pricing Carbon pricing and carbon taxes are now proposed by international institutions and mainstream economics as the main solutions to ending global warming and destructive climate change. For some time, the IMF has been pushing for carbon pricing as ‘a necessary if not sufficient’ part of a climate policy package that also includes investment in ‘green technology’ and redistribution of income to help the worst-off cope with the financial burden. The IMF is now proposing a global minimum carbon price — along the lines of the global minimum floor on corporate taxes which has recently secured agreement. At the recent meeting of the G20 finance ministers, carbon pricing was endorsed as one of “a wide set of tools” to tackle climate change. Speaking at the Venice International Conference on Climate, Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, also underscored the need for carbon pricing, emphasising the importance of an “effective carbon price that reflects the true cost of carbon”. An agreed carbon price would then be a precursor to the establishment of a carbon border tax, which would serve as a tariff on imports from countries without carbon pricing. This would be an incentive for others to join the ‘coalition of the willing’.
Seven Reasons Why Policymakers Should Reject Carbon Capture and Storage CCS)
- The buildout of CCS infrastructure presents serious health, safety, and environmental risks.
- CCS is not consistent with the principles of environmental justice.
- Rather than replacing fossil fuels, carbon capture technology prolongs our dependence on them. process generates even more emissions if supplied by fossil fuels.
- The majority of captured carbon is used to pump more oil out of the ground.
- There is no economic rationale for the massive deployment of CCS.
- CCS does not remove CO2 from the atmosphere. 7. Science and existing regulations do not back the promise of “permanent” storage or sequestration of carbon.
- Science and existing regulations do not back the promise of “permanent” storage or sequestration of carbon.
In China, ‘Heaviest Rain in 1,000 Years’ Triggers Deadly Flooding, Landslides At least 25 people in the central province of Henan have died and roughly 200,000 residents have been evacuated as of Wednesday.
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
Black Agenda Radio for Week of July 19, 2021
Zuma Imprisonment: “Riots” or “Insurrection” in South Africa? In the wake of the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma on corruption charges, two South African provinces were swept by riots that current President Cyril Ramaphosa called an attempted “insurrection” against the state. “This is no way to address the differences” in the country, said Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Detroit-based Pan African News Wire. “South Africa has the worst Covid-19 epidemic on the continent. The focus should be on mitigating the spread” of the disease.
US Destabilizes Planet, Blames China and Cuba Despite portraying Donald Trump as representing everything they oppose, when Democratic President Joe Biden took over the White House he left Trump’s measures against Cuba and China intact, virtually unchanged. As activists in the belly of the beast, “We must take a stand against US militarism, said Netfa Freeman, an organizer with the Black Alliance for Peace who was interviewed on Sputnik Radio by Sean Blackmon and Jacqueline Luqman.
Class Struggle Shapes Haiti Political Conflict Class conflicts between Africa-born and Haiti-born Blacks and mulattos shaped Haitian political battle lines before and after the 1804 revolution and to this day, said Haitian American author and activist Pascal Robert. The descendants of “African peasants make up Haiti’s poor majority today,” said Robert, speaking at a webinar on Haiti at Broward College in south Florida.
Labor:
Larger companies like Toyota, Bridgestone, Panasonic, and Samsung, are top-tier sponsors who have separate deals with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The IOC is due to receive full revenues from its lucrative broadcasting rights. Sponsors have already run lucrative ticket campaigns, with ticket sales alone contributing $800 million to Tokyo 2020. Rather than face a shortfall, it is likely the organisers will refund ticket holders through a taxpayer bailout. In other words, the working class will have to compensate the capitalists for their lost profits. . . . The poll that indicated an historically low level of support for the LDP also showed 64.8 percent of the people “support no particular party”, meaning that an absolute majority of Japanese masses do not trust any of the political choices that Japan’s capitalist system has to offer. This is hardly surprising. The pandemic and the Olympics have thrown the rottenness of the Japanese political establishment into sharp relief. It is a scandal that the Games have gone ahead over the heads of working people, who in an additional insult might have to subsidise the bosses for lost earnings! The masses should not be made to foot the bill for the mess the bourgeoisie have created. The Marxists say: make the bosses pay for the consequences of the COVID-19 crisis, and this shambles of an Olympic Games! — Tokyo Olympics: Whoever Wins – The Workers Lose
Economy:
FRED: Effective Federal Funds Rate: 0.10%
The United States Underestimates China’s Economic Challenge at Its Own Peril The economy of the People’s Republic of China has been growing much faster than that of the United States for decades. So too has China’s average real wage. China is now the world’s second superpower, catching up to the United States economically if not (yet) militarily. Its political influence grew alongside its GDP. Where once the chief scapegoat for the U.S. was the USSR/Russia, China has replaced the latter in that position. The global tourist industry courts Chinese big spenders.
Shrunk (China Gained) 
hy Are the Long-term US Treasury Yields Falling? First, let me answer the question in the title: I do not know because, according to conventional theories, when the realised and expected inflation rates are as high as they are in the United States (US), the long-term US Treasury yields should go up. Although the realised and expected inflation rates have been going up since April 2021, the long-term US Treasury yields, however, have not been rising. Not only that, but they have started falling. We see this from Figure 1, which is the daily graph of the 10-year US Treasury yield from 2 January 2020 to 9 July 2021
Law Firm that Was Sued Last Year by NYS Attorney General for Refusing to Turn Over Trump Documents Lands a Partner to Head the Criminal Division in Biden’s Justice Department It’s starting to look very swampy again in the nation’s capitol. President Biden pushed forward a law partner from the law firm that notoriously represented Donald Trump and the Trump Organization on tax matters for 15 years, right up to January of this year, to be the head of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Astonishingly, on Tuesday, the Senate confirmed that nominee, Kenneth A. Polite, for the position.
These Charts Challenge the Status Quo Thinking on the Stock MarketThese Charts Challenge the Status Quo Thinking on the Stock Market The only time that tens of millions of Americans typically hear anything about the stock market on the evening news is when the S&P 500 Index sets a new high. That’s been happening a lot this year. For example, on June 30 it was widely reported that the S&P 500 had clinched its sixth record close for the year. But beneath the surface of that cheerful sound bite, major deterioration in the underpinnings of the market has been taking place. For example, recently there have been more stocks on the New York Stock Exchange setting 3-month lows than setting three-month highs. The same is true for the Nasdaq stock market and dramatically so for the smaller companies that trade Over-the-Counter (OTC). These measurements gauge the “breadth of the market.” When new lows consistently trounce new highs, it can be a forewarning of a looming market correction.
World:
Clueless Douchebag Thanks Vassals From the Bottom of Where His Heart Should Be For Peeing In Enough Bottles To Pay For His 10-Minute Joyride Into Space Well that was something. Celebrating his “best day ever,” the richest and most solipsistic man on the planet exultantly returned from his 10-minute-10 second, $5.5 billion, incalculably profligate space caper on a dildo-shaped rocket ship and had what one sage termed “the fucking nerve” to thank all the little people – ie: “every Amazon employee” – who unwittingly and unwillingly funded his “masturbatory space venture” by slaving away in his evil Amazon empire with no voice, union, living wage or time to piss.
Tokyo Olympics: Whoever Wins – The Workers Lose The shambolic, much-delayed Tokyo Olympics open tomorrow. The Games proceed without fans, and amidst general disapproval from Japanese workers and youth, who rightly fear the danger of spreading COVID-19, and are enraged at the cynical attempts by the bosses to force them to make up their shortfall from ticket sales.
Education, 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!
The Drug Companies Are Killing People I get to say this about the drug companies, now that President Biden has said that Facebook is killing people because it was allowing people to use its system to spread lies about the vaccines. There is actually a better case against the drug companies. After all, they are using their government-granted patent monopolies, and their control over technical information about the production of vaccines, to limit the supply of vaccines available to the world. As a result, most of the population in the developing world is not yet vaccinated. And, unlike the followers of Donald Trump, people in developing countries are not vaccinated because they can’t get vaccines.
Profits Instead of Humanity’s Survivial! ‘A Death Sentence for So Many’: Rich Nations Once Again Block Progress on Vaccine Patent Waiver “The pandemic is a test and the world is failing,” said the head of the World Health Organization. An informal World Trade Organization meeting on uesday ended without any discernible progress toward a deal on a patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines as rich countries continue to stonewall the proposal, despite the accelerating spread of the ultra-contagious Delta variant and the likely emergence of other dangerous mutations.
As US ‘Drowning’ in Unused Doses, WHO Chief Laments ‘Horrifying Injustice’ of Covid-19 Vaccine Inequity “None of us is safe until all of us are safe. The tragedy of this pandemic is that it could have been under control by now, if vaccines had been allocated more equitably.”