Daily News Digest August 4, 2021

Images of the Day:

2021: Big And Little Brother Are Watching: Julia Angwin talks about the many ways that the government, private businesses, and criminals can and do collect our private data. Julia shows that because of the pervasiveness of the surveillance system we live in today, we are in danger of becoming a society that self-censors itself instead of demanding our rights.

Another Example of Capitalism as a Failed System: World CaAnpilalism Was Aware of the Danger of Cornovavirus Thr eat Over 5 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!

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:

Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four): Big Brother is a fictional character and symbol in George Orwell‘s dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. He is ostensibly the leader of Oceania, a totalitarian state wherein the ruling party, Ingsoc, wields total power “for its own sake” over the inhabitants. In the society that Orwell describes, every citizen is under constant surveillance by the authorities, mainly by telescreens (with the exception of the Proles). The people are constantly reminded of this by the slogan “Big Brother is watching you”: a maxim that is ubiquitously on display. In modern culture, the term “Big Brother” has entered the lexicon as a synonym for abuse of government power, particularly in respect to civil liberties, often specifically related to mass surveillance.

Ignorance is Strength: This phrase appears in George Orwell’s novel, 1984. The author has used it as the slogan of the Party in the very first part of the novel, where it reads, “War is Peace / Freedom is Slavery / Ignorance is Strength” (Part-I, Chapter-I). By using this slogan, Big Brother could reign supreme, destroy the past, and build up the future on account of the ignorance of people. Had they been aware, they would have understood Big Brother’s manipulations, and would not let him rule. Hence, their ignorance blinded them, and delegated their strength and power to the Party and Big Brother.

Laissez-Faire Capitalism: Often, laissez-faire capitalism is also referred to as free market capitalism or market capitalism. Simply put, laissez-faire translates to “leave us alone” meaning that the government should remain out of the economy and instead allow individuals to freely carry out their own economic affairs

Videos of the Day:

Chrid Hedgea: The Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell

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, 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!

President Biden Has Refused, to Use His Option, to Free the Vacine, — Humanity Will Not Be Covid-19 Pandemic Free, If the Vaccine is Not Free!

The lesson of the coronavirus vaccine response is that a few billion dollars a year spent on additional basic research could prevent a thousand times as much loss in death, illness, and economic destruction. At a news conference, US health adviser, Anthony Fauci, highlighted the spike protein work. “We shouldn’t underestimate the value of basic biology research,” Fauci said. Exactly. But as many authors, such as Mariana Mazzacuto have shown, state funding and research has been vital to development of such products. What better lesson can we learn from the COVID vaccine experience than that the multi-national pharma companies should be publicly owned so that research and development can be directed to meet the health and medical needs of people rather than to the profits of these companies. Then the necessary vaccines can get to the billions in the poorest countries and circumstances rather than to just those countries and people who can afford to pay the prices set by these companies. “This is the people’s vaccine,” said corporate critic Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program. “Federal scientists helped invent it and taxpayers are funding its development. … It should belong to humanity.” — COVID Vaccines: Calling the Shots

The Return of Laissez-Faire Capitalism: Laissez-Faire Capitalism: Ralph Nader: Collapsing Federal Corporate Crime Enforcement As the size and severity of the corporate crime wave surges, Congress is asleep at the switch. The mostly captive Capitol Hill Gang has sat on an antiquated federal criminal code, starved the budget of regulatory health, safety, and consumer/labor protection agencies, and let corporate crooks routinely get away with their crimes. Despite constant exposés in the mainstream media – still only reporting the tip of the iceberg – neither members of Congress nor presidents from the Republican and Democratic parties have raised the banner of tough “law and order” to counter rampaging corporate crime. Proposals to bring the laws up to date in their penalties and coverage to deter corporate lawbreaking are never a priority for Congress. When was the last time you heard a politician demand “corporate reform”?

Insulated From Patent Waivers, Pfizer and Moderna Hike Vaccine Prices The pharmaceutical industries fight to maintain intellectual property protections as the pandemic ravages the world. “Capitalism never fails to not surprise,” wrote one observer.”Our governments are complicit in this heist by pharma and companies across the board in other sectors. It’s the system they helped create.” —Tahir Amin, intellectual property lawyer With some of the world’s wealthiest countries continuing to oppose temporary patent waivers for Covid-19 vaccines in order to more rapidly deploy life-saving shots worldwide, pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Moderna have raised the price for European Union orders.

“It is perfectly clear that the existing state is neither able nor willing to do anything to remedy the housing difficulty. The state is nothing but the organized collective power of the possessing classes, the landowners and the capitalists as against the exploited classes, the peasants and the workers. What the individual capitalists (and it is here only a question of these because in this matter the landowner who is also concerned acts primarily as a capitalist) do not want, their state also does not want. If therefore the individual capitalists deplore the housing shortage, but can hardly be persuaded even superficially to palliate its most terrifying consequences, then the collective capitalist, the state, will not do much more. At the most it will see to it that the measure of superficial palliation which has become standard is carried out everywhere uniformly. And we have already seen that this is the case.” ― Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question

“For our workers in the big cities, freedom of movement is the prime condition of existence, and landownership can only be a fetter to them. Give them their own houses, chain them once again to the soil, and you break their power of resistance to the wage cutting of the factory owners. The individual worker might be able to sell his house on occasion, but during a big strike or a general industrial crisis all the houses belonging to the workers affected would have to be put up for sale, and would therefore find no purchasers or be sold off far below their cost price.” ― Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question

Homes — Not “Sanctioned Encampments” — Are the Solution to Homelessness The real answer to homelessness can only be homes, and the proper funding to make them supportive and livable. The crisis of homelessness, already disastrous before March 2020, has been aggravated by the widespread unemployment, evictions and shelter closures resulting from the pandemic. The COVID-19 recession dealt enormous damage to the most precarious layers of the working class, and the July 31 expiration of the federal eviction moratorium promises to inflict yet more destitution. According to some projections, COVID will eventually produce homelessness rates double those of 2008’s Great Recession — with disproportionate impacts on people of color. Compounding the issue are disasters like the fires attributed to climate change that have struck the West Coast, which can rapidly render large populations unhoused and destroy already sparse housing stock. Individual causes of homelessness vary, yet, in all cases, the catalyst of the crisis has been the severe nationwide deficit of affordable housing and social services.

The Right Wing Wants Misinformation and Manufactured Ignorance, Not Democracy Manufactured ignorance now thrives in a world of interlacing disasters. This age of consuming catastrophes is part and parcel of an age of survival-of-the fittest economics fueled by the rise of right-wing authoritarianism and political extremists. The rule of markets and its legitimating notion of economic Darwinism represents a return to the massive inequalities and culture of cruelty that marked the Gilded Age. This was an era when entrepreneurial pieties were used to legitimize unfettered markets and the concentration of power in the hands of a financial elite. In its updated versions, the new Gilded Age of neoliberal capitalism continues with a vengeance to reward the ultra-rich and powerful while beating workers, immigrants, and poor Black and Brown people into the ground

Environment:

“‘There’s a ton of climate disinformation around carbon capture, and for obvious reasons, because the fossil fuel industries benefit from this,’ said Dr. Tamra Gilbertson, carbon pricing education coordinator at the Indigenous Environmental Network. ‘[This] technology is not going to benefit the climate at all. It’s benefiting the private industries and these big multinational corporations. They know exactly what they’re doing.'” — Sandra Steingraber Re: The Oil Industry’s New Climate Change Solution Is More Pipelines

Infrastructure Bill Wastes Billions in Giveaways to Oil and Gas Industry Following the introduction of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act Carroll Muffett, President and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) issued the following statement: “The Infrastructure bill offers minimal support to accelerate the renewable energy transition while squandering tens of billions on carbon capture, fossil hydrogen, and other subsidies designed to prop up a failing industry and entrench the fossil economy for decades to come. It calls on US states to compound these subsidies by giving carbon capture projects a minimum ten-year holiday from state taxes. It proposes to weaken critical environmental review processes, putting frontline communities — disproportionality communities of color — at even greater risk. And it wastes limited public dollars exploring long-debunked denialist claims about the life-cycle impacts of electric cars. With members of the Exxon 11 making up fully a third of the bill’s co-authors, the result is deeply disappointing but hardly surprising. “As a corporate giveaway, the energy provisions in the Infrastructure bill are a massive success. As a response to the climate emergency, they are a dismal failure.”

Report Outlines ‘Crucial’ Need for Biden Administration to Aid Climate Refugees “Ready solutions are available to address root causes and displacement that are centered in human rights and humanitarian protection.”

How Corporate Courts Impede Efforts to Battle the Climate Crisis A legacy of colonialism and 20th century international trade agreements, so-called “investor-state dispute settlements” are hampering moves to ditch fossil fuels.

We Need Radical Economic Change—Not Biden’s Corporate Capitalism

Stimulus packages are not enough. Only practices of deep democracy and shared ownership can end our cycle of economic disaster.

Civilization-Ending Climate Change Is Knocking On Our Door We are standing in an extinction event. Many of us started noticing it when the insects began to vanish in large numbers right after the turn of the century. I’ll never forget the day the trucker called into my radio show. It was probably around 14 years ago, and he identified himself as a long-haul trucker who regularly ran a coast-to-coast route from the southeast to the Pacific Northwest dozens of times a year. “Used to be when I was driving through the southern part of the Midwest like I am right now,” he said, “I’d have to stop every few hours to clean the bugs off my windshield. It’s been three days since I’ve had to clean bugs off my windshield on this trip. There’s something spooky going on out here.”

Black Liberation/Civil Rights:

Labor:

Economy:

Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update (August 2nd to August 5th,)

Real Second-Quarter 2021 Construction Spending Contracted at an Annualized Pace of 11.2% (-11.2%)
Real Second-Quarter 2021 GDP Growth Came in at an Annualized 6.5%, Somewhat Shy of Expectations, With GDP Inflation at a 40-Year Peak; Benchmark Revisions Showed Somewhat Higher Levels of Activity in the Great Recession into 2014, but Lower Levels 2015 to Date, Particularly in 2018, but No New Downturn [see LATEST NUMBERS]
Preliminary July 2021 Monetary Base Numbers All Hit New Historic Levels or Cycle-High Annual Growth
July FOMC Policies Were Unchanged
June 2021 “Basic M1” Money Supply Surged to a Record 87.8% Gain Versus Its Pre-Pandemic Trough, Up from 81.1% in May; All Money Supply and Monetary Base Dollar Levels Are at Historic Highs and at Record- or Cycle-High Growth [See the SYSTEMIC RISK Section for FOMC and Money Supply Details]
The Still-Unfolding “Recession-Depression” Recovery Remains Well Shy of Its Pre-Recession Peak, as Reflected in Payroll Employment, Reflecting the Surge in Money,
June CPI and PPI Inflation Have Exploded, Well in Excess of Consensus Expectations, While Faltering Business Activity Has Begun to Intensify Anew

“Doomsday Machine’: U.S. Banking System Has a $168 Trillion Nightmare Looming. It Was Ignored in Written Testimony for Today’s Senate Banking Hearing Risky derivative bets made by the mega banks on Wall Street, offloaded onto inadequately capitalized counterparties, were at the core of the collapse of the U.S. financial system in 2008. That collapse left millions of Americans without jobs, which led to millions of families and traumatized children losing their homes to foreclosure. The bank bosses got their million-dollar bonuses from the taxpayer bailouts and the Federal Reserve secretly pumped in $29 trillion over 31 months to shore up the failing trading houses on Wall Street and their foreign derivative counterparties. Wall Street banks have rebuilt that derivatives doomsday machine today – a $168 trillion monster concentrated at four mega banks on Wall Street. But as we read through dozens of pages of written testimony submitted by witnesses for today’s Senate Banking

World:

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!

Capitalism Primes Our Bodies for Illness As much of the world struggles to cope with the pandemic and its impacts, we speak with Dr. Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, co-authors of the new book, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, which examines the social and environmental roots of poor health. “Inflammation is the body’s appropriate response to damage, or the threat of damage,” says Marya, a physician and co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition. “We’re learning that the social structures around us, the environmental, political structures around us, are tuning the immune system to sound out the full range of inflammation.” Patel adds that “capitalism primes bodies … for sickness.”