Daily News Digest August 17, 2021
Over a Hundred Years Ago. Rosa Luxemburg Raised the Slogan: Socialism or Barbarism! The Slogan for 2021 is Ecosocialism or Ecocide!!!!
Daily News Digest Archives
Images of the Day:
Latuff: $1Billion for Aparthide
Pandemic
Another Example of Capitalism as a Failed System: World Capilalism Was Aware of the Danger of Cornovavirus Threat 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:
In one of the biggest corporate marketing/promotional crimes – over 500,000 opioid deaths so far and accelerating, the Sackler’s company, Purdue Pharma, escaped into bankruptcy while the Sacklers escaped any criminal prosecution. As a part of the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy the Sacklers negotiated for personal immunity from further civil suits, and the wrongdoers only had to fork over $4.5 billion, (spread out over years no less!) of their immense fortune. Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to three felony charges in 2020, but under the settlement with the Justice Department, the Sacklers agreed to pay $225 million but made no admissions of wrongdoing. I once recall a person stealing a donkey in Colorado going to jail for 15 years. — “Nobody Is Above the Law”—Except the Biggest Corporate and Government Criminals
Videos of the Day:
Scientist Rebellion Testimonies
On Contact: WWII America’s Historical Myths
Big Agriculture’s Bleak Future For All of Us!
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!
Tariq Ali: Debacle in Afghanistan The fall of Kabul to the Taliban on 15 August 2021 is a major political and ideological defeat for the American Empire. The crowded helicopters carrying US Embassy staff to Kabul airport were startlingly reminiscent of the scenes in Saigon – now Ho Chi Minh City – in April 1975. The speed with which Taliban forces stormed the country was astonishing; their strategic acumen remarkable. A week-long offensive ended triumphantly in Kabul. The 300,000-strong Afghan army crumbled. Many refused to fight. In fact, thousands of them went over to the Taliban, who immediately demanded the unconditional surrender of the puppet government. President Ashraf Ghani, a favourite of the US media, fled the country and sought refuge in Oman. The flag of the revived Emirate is now fluttering over his Presidential palace. In some respects, the closest analogy is not Saigon but nineteenth-century Sudan, when the forces of the Mahdi swept into Khartoum and martyred General Gordon. William Morris celebrated the Mahdi’s victory as a setback for the British Empire. Yet while the Sudanese insurgents killed an entire garrison, Kabul changed hands with little bloodshed. The Taliban did not even attempt to take the US embassy, let alone target American personnel.
Setback for Assange in UK Trial Over US Effort to Extradite Wikileaks Founder Wikileaks founder Julian Assange lost a high court decision Wednesday, which now allows the U.S. government to expand the grounds for its appeal of a January ruling of Magistrate Vanessa Baraitser. She had at that time denied extradition to the United States to face charges of espionage in a Virginia court, a jurisdiction where whistleblowers never win and cannot use the “public interest” or any reason for motivation to reveal “national security secrets.” Assange’s mental and physical health has been steadily deteriorating after being holed up for nearly seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and subsequently spending 28 months and counting incarcerated in isolation in Britain’s most Middle Ages prison, Bellmarsh. Nevertheless, neither Baraitser nor this high court will allow him to be freed while awaiting the final appeal ruling, which could take another two or more years to happen.
Howard Zinn: What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire Perhaps even more relevant today than it was in 2008, when it was first published, is the remarkable Howard Zinn’s writing on how, from his childhood in school to his years as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War and beyond, he had to discover for himself that his country was an imperial power of the first order, another empire in a long history of them. Perhaps even more relevant today than it was in 2008, when it was first published, is the remarkable Howard Zinn’s writing on how, from his childhood in school to his years as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War and beyond, he had to discover for himself that his country was an imperial power of the first order, another empire in a long history of them.
After 20 Years of Lies and War, US Retreat Underway as Taliban Retake Control of Afghanistan A spokesperson for the Taliban said its soldiers are “awaiting a peaceful transfer of power” outside the nation’s capital city.
Ralph Nader: “Nobody Is Above the Law”—Except the Biggest Corporate and Government Criminals When it comes to the crimes of large corporations and their bosses, immunity or impunity is what they expect. When it comes to the crimes of large corporations and their bosses, immunity or impunity is what they expect.
From Vietnam to Afghanistan, All US Governments ‘Spin’ Lies The Washington Post has, after more than two years of investigation, revealed that senior foreign policy officials in the White House, State and Defense departments have known for some time that the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was failing. Interview transcripts from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, obtained by the Post after many lawsuits, show that for 18 years these same officials have told the public the intervention was succeeding. In other words, government officials have been lying. Few people are shocked. That’s a stark contrast to 1971, when the Pentagon Papers, a classified study of decision-making about Vietnam, were leaked and published. The explosive Pentagon Papers showed that the U.S. government had systematically lied about the reality that the U.S. was losing the Vietnam War. The failure of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan has been known for years. Virtually none of the U.S. goals have been met. These goals included a strong, democratic, uncorrupt central government; the defeat of the Taliban; eliminating the poppy fields that contribute to the world’s heroin problem; an effective military and police and creating a healthy, diversified economy.
Environment:
July was Earth’s Hottest Month On Record July is usually the warmest month, but this year it went over the top
“It’s a Sea of Oil”: Outrage in Trinidad Over Latest Spill Destroying Ecosystem, Fishery“There have been in excess of 377 oil spills since 2015 and no one has ever been charged or prosecuted. Every drop of hydrocarbon has an ever-lasting impact on our marine ecosystem.”
Greed and Consumption: Why the World Is Burning If we continue to talk about global warming without confronting the capitalist menace that generated much of the crisis in the first place, the conversation will continue to amount to nil.
Lake Mead
Black Liberation/Civil Rights:
And I finally said to him that it’s a nice thing to say to people that you ought to lift yourself by your own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And the fact is that millions of Negroes, as a result of centuries of denial and neglect, have been left bootless. And they find themselves impoverished aliens in this affluent society. And there is a great deal that the society can and must do if the Negro is to gain the economic security that he needs. Now one of the answers, it seems to me, is a guaranteed annual income, a guaranteed minimum income for all people and for all families of our country. It seems to me that the Civil Rights Movement must now begin to organize for the guaranteed annual income. Begin to organize people all over our country and mobilize forces so that we can bring to the attention of our nation this need, and this something which I believe will go a long, long way toward dealing with the Negro’s economic problem and the economic problem which many other poor people confront in our nation. — MILK, The Other America Speech Stanford UniversityApril 14, 1967
My introduction to King’s, The Other America, for the San Francisco BayView (2009): Below is one of his last speeches, given over 40 years ago and one year before his assassination, at Stanford University in April 1967 and titled The Other America. Here he speaks not of a dream but of the nightmarish economic condition of Black people. When he talks about ‘work-starved men searching for jobs that do not exist’ and living on a ‘lonely island of poverty surrounded by an ocean of material prosperity,’ the speech remains timely in today’s world.
Labor:
$15-an-Hour Minimum Wage Is All the Rage, But Is It Livable? There is a growing movement for raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour to help reduce stress on low-wage workers. But a new report reveals that a $15 hourly wage isn’t always livable. A recent proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour failed in the U.S. Senate, keeping the federal rate at the same $7.25 it has been at since 2009. At the current federal rate, a full-time worker in 2021 will barely break the single-household poverty guideline of $12,880 annually and would still be well below the threshold for a two-person household of $17,420. While living on federal minimum wage in 2009 may have been possible, due to inflation and skyrocketing cost of living, many minimum wage workers now are forced to hold several jobs just to make ends meet. But would more than doubling the federal minimum wage afford these workers a 2021-adjusted livable wage?
Economy:
World:
John Pilger: A Day in the Death of British Justice I sat in Court 4 in the Royal Courts of Justice in London yesterday with Stella Moris, Julian Assange’s partner. I have known Stella for as long as I have known Julian. She, too, is a voice of freedom, coming from a family that fought the fascism of Apartheid. Today, her name was uttered in court by a barrister and a judge, forgettable people were it not for the power of their endowed privilege. The barrister, Clair Dobbin, is in the pay of the regime in Washington, first Trump’s then Biden’s. She is America’s hired gun, or “silk”, as she would prefer. Her target is Julian Assange, who has committed no crime and has performed an historic public service by exposing the criminal actions and secrets on which governments, especially those claiming to be democracies, base their authority. For those who may have forgotten, WikiLeaks, of which Assange is founder and publisher, exposed the secrets and lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, Syria and Yemen, the murderous role of the Pentagon in dozens of countries, the blueprint for the 20-year catastrophe in Afghanistan, the attempts by Washington to overthrow elected governments, such as Venezuela’s, the collusion between nominal political opponents (Bush and Obama) to stifle a torture investigation and the CIA’s Vault 7 campaign that turned your mobile phone, even your TV set, into a spy in your midst.
Why Does Israel Have a Stockpile of Nuclear Weapons? The main result of the meeting between Presidents Putin and Biden in Geneva on June 16 was the joint statement that “we reaffirm the principle that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” This most welcome recognition that nuclear war would probably destroy the world is especially relevant now, because August sees the 76th anniversary of the first — and so far the last — use of nuclear weapons in war. On 6 August 1945 a US atomic bomb exploded over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing some 70,000 people. On August 9 another bomb destroyed Nagasaki city, causing about 40,000 deaths. Japan surrendered on August 15, thereby ending a world war that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people, mainly civilians.
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!
Big Pharma Kills! — As Long as the Covid Vaccine is Not Free for All, and Distributed for All, Throughout the World, A Doomsday Virus is Highly Probale!: The Delta Variant Is Only the Beginning of ‘Doomsday’ Variants, Experts Say “I wouldn’t be incredibly surprised if something else came along that’s even more transmissible,” Eric Vail, director of molecular pathology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, told Newsweek. A number of experts told Newsweek that the delta variant will not be the final variant we see A number of scientists recently spoke with Newsweek about the potential of a “doomsday COVID variant” that would be worse than the delta and lambda variants. Experts told Newsweek that the delta variant won’t be the only coronavirus variant that makes its way through the United States. In fact, more mutations will come soon. This new Florida variant may be the ‘zeta’ variant. Here’s why The next big variant may come from one single person, per Newsweek. If one person suffers from a mutation that is more highly transmissible, they will pass it onto someone else, and then it will spread like wildfire as these mutations have done already.
Capitalism and the Covid-19 Crisis: One Class Accumulates Victims, The Other Accumulates Profits As of this writing, over four million people worldwide have died as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is well known that most of these victims were working class — the employed as well as the desperately poor and the precariat — the class unable to confine itself at home. The pandemic has also clearly illustrated that the working class is the one essential class, having nursed the sick, fed the world and developed a vaccine while the bourgeoisie sheltered in its mansions. The different capitalist states, with only minimal variations, protected the wealthy while sacrificing the working class and the poor. With the advent of Covid-19 vaccines, unequal access to healthcare systems, worsened by decades of neoliberal reforms, became a major crisis in all countries, and under governments of diverse political orientations.
Louisiana and Mississippi Health Systems on Brink of Collapse as Low-Vaccinated Regions Suffer “Let us be very clear that the vast majority of cases and hospitalizations and deaths are unvaccinated,” said one state health official.