Daily News Digest October 21, 2021

Daily News Digest October 21, 2021

Daily News Digest Archives

Images of the Day

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!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 (Fascism)!    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!

Quotes of the Day:

Togther!Videos of the Day:

10,000 Striking John Deere Workers Demand “Equitable” Pay & Benefits as Company Sees Record Profits

“Dire Crisis of Poverty”: NYC Taxi Drivers Launch Hunger Strike to Demand Relief from Medallion Debt

Striketober: Labor Militancy Grows as U.S. Workers Walk Off the Job & IATSE Members Get Tentative Deal

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! Every ‘Tax. Reform’ From President Kennedy has Been an incrase in taxes from the Poor,the Woking Class, and the Middle Class, to the Rich! —The United States takes from the poor and gives to the Rich.  Tax the Rich!  — They Can Afford To Pay!

The UN Issued a Global Warming Red Alert:  United States Blocks Climate Action! Senate (Majority Democrat) Quietly Adds $10 Billion to Pentagon Budget While Blocking Climate Action Senate Quietly Adds $10 Billion to Pentagon Budget While Blocking Climate Action The 2022 budget for the Defense Department adds an extra $10 billion on top of the already colossal $715 billion that the Pentagon requested, according to a version of the bill that Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) unveiled on Monday.With amendments and other funding, this brings the total of 2022 appropriations for the Pentagon and defense-related spending to a whopping $778 billion — 5 percent more than the amount that was appropriated for the 2021 fiscal year. Last month, the House passed a $768 billion budget for defense.

Environment:              

Adding  $Billions More to Pentgon Budget Fuels Global Warming!:    The United States is ranked #1 in global warming emitions (Ranking Global Warming Contributions  by Country) but, actually, the United States has contributed far more global warming admission, if you consider the 800 U.S. military bases and wars, throughout the world. From The Military Pumps Out Staggering Quantities of Toxic Waste, Water and Air Pollution and Radiation: Environmentalists are ignoring the elephant in the room … the world’s largest polluter: . . . The Pentagon is also one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters in the world … and yet has a blanket exemption from all greenhouse gas treaties.The defense department also uses open-air burn pits which send a parade of horribles into the air. Sea life is not exempt. And the military has long been  is a flagrant user of chemical weapons and depleted uranium . . .  which can trash ecosystems and human health. And Despite our unorthodox presidential election, America’s overseas military bases are largely taken for granted in today’s foreign policy debates. The U.S. maintains a veritable empire of military bases throughout the world— about 800 of them in more than 70 countries. Many view our bases as a symbol of our status as the dominant world power. But America’s forward-deployed military posture incurs substantial costs and disadvantages, exposing the U.S. to vulnerabilities and unintended consequences. (See:Why We Should Close America’s Overseas Military Bases) — Another Global Warming Elephant in the Room: The Pentagon Military Industrial Complex!

Permian Basin: Permian Basin, also called West Texas Basin, large sedimentary basin in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico, U.S., noted for its rich petroleum, natural gas, and potassium deposits. Owing to its economic importance, it is one of the most well-studied geologic regions of the world. Deposits of the Permian Basin are featured in Guadalupe Mountains National Park.Exposing Massive Threats From Permian Basin Development The six-part Permian Climate Bomb series explores the ongoing oil, gas and petrochemical boom in the Permian Basin, a story of runaway toxic infrastructure, environmental injustice and climate overshoot. This series analyzes the climate, public health, economic and social impacts of the Permian fracking boom. It illuminates the Permian Basin’s link to environmental injustice and petrochemical expansion on the Gulf Coast. The report also follows the flow of Permian hydrocarbons to export markets. Finally, it gives voice to the impact fossil fuel infrastructure places on communities, spotlighting the individuals confronting the oil and gas industry in the region.   
Oil and gas production in the Permian Basin has grown more than 5 times in the past decade. Despite the climate crisis, it is still expected to grow aggressively in the coming decade. At a time when the world’s leading scientists agree that “rapid, transformative, and sustained action is needed to ensure that global warming does not exceed 1.5°C temperature levels,” the United States cannot afford to develop new fossil fuel reserves, nor continue to increase its exports overseas. The Permian Basin is also responsible for fueling an explosion in plastic processing and manufacturing along the Gulf Coast. Communities already burdened with toxic chemical plants are witnessing expansions of new and existing plants, raising their cumulative toxic burden higher than ever before. This plastics production boom ignores the outcry of communities and governments worldwide over the plastic pollution crisis, threatening the survival of countless species, and causing immeasurable harm to public health and ecosystems worldwide.  While production, exports and plastics all pose unique threats to frontline communities, decades of regulatory failure and insufficient environmental enforcement have enabled Permian oil and gas operations to become some of the dirtiest in the world. The intensity of drilling, water, sand and chemical use, and the lack of regulatory oversight, has turned parts of the basin into an industrial wasteland; decreasing the quality of life for residents, threatening local agriculture, ranching, tourism and recreation, and relegating the basic health and safety of residents as an afterthought to the industry’s pursuit of growth.Capitalism to the World: Burn Baby Burn!: Fossil Fuel Drilling Plans Undermine Climate Pledges, U.N. Report Warns  Countries are planning to produce more than twice as much oil, gas and coal through 2030 as would be needed if governments want to limit global warming to Paris Agreement goals. Even as world leaders vow to take stronger action on climate change, many countries are still planning to dramatically increase their production of oil, gas and coal in the decades ahead, potentially undermining those lofty pledges, according to a United Nations-backed report released Tuesday.

World Fossil Production Still Far Beyond 1.5°C Limit, UN Agency Warns Canada shows up as the world’s fourth-biggest oil and gas producer, and global fossil fuel production in 2030 will still be more than double the amount that would match a 1.5°C climate pathway, according to the 2021 Production Gap Report due to be released this morning by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The study of more than 15 major fossil-producing countries, including Canada, found that key governments are planning to extract 240% more coal, 57% more oil, and 71% more natural gas at the end of this decade than would be consistent with the 1.5°C target in the Paris climate agreement, UNEP says, in an initial release distributed earlier this week.Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:

Food Apartheid Threatens BIPOC Children’s Health. Food Sovereignty Is the Fix. Food insecurity rates for African American, Latinx and Indigenous families are disproportionally high. Defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as a “household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food,” food insecurity rates for African American and Latinx households from 2001 to 2016 were at double the rates of food insecurity in white and Asian American households. According to 2017 data published by Partnership with Native Americans, 35 percent of Native American children live in poverty, and Native American families are 400 percent more likely than other U.S. families to report not having enough to eat. The problem of food insecurity has increased through the ongoing COVID crisis. According to the 2020 Census Household Pulse Survey (CHHPS), which collects data on food sufficiency for the Institute for Policy Research, “Across the eight weeks for which CHHPS microdata are available, covering April 23–June 23, 41.1% of Black respondents’ households have experienced food insecurity in the prior week, as have 36.9% of Hispanic respondents’ households and 23.2% of White respondents’ households.”

From The Brennan Center’s Series  America’s criminal legal system is unduly harsh. Experts explain how we got here and solutions that will benefit everyone. F1rst Three Essays:

1. The Era of Punitive Excess The criminal justice system is marred by an overreliance on excessive punishment.This essay is the first in the Brennan Center’s series examining the punitive excess that has come to define America’s criminal legal system. Despite a small decline in incarceration rates over the last decade, American criminal justice policy remains at its most punishing point in history. The extent of correctional supervision — including community supervision on probation and parole as well as institutional supervision in prison and jails — expanded steadily from the early 1970s for the next three decades. In 2018, the total correctional population numbered 6.4 million adults, 2.1 million of them incarcerated.2.How Punitive Excess Is a Manifestation of Racism in America The criminal justice system’s past and present is intertwined with its use as a tool against people of color. There is a widely accepted narrative about incarceration in the United States that goes something like this:  At the dawn of the Reagan era in a nation of 225 million Americans, the incarcerated population was a little more than half a million people with 8 percent behind bars for drug offenses. The “War on Drugs” that raged throughout the 1980s and into the next decade — bringing with it statutory reforms that relied heavily on increased policing, incarceration, and mandatory sentencing — caused the imprisonment rate to more than triple to 695 per capita with 24 percent serving time for drug offenses. As a result, nearly 2.3 million people are locked up in the United States today. And the march toward this mass incarceration occurred with Black Americans squarely underfoot, trampling their communities and imprinting racial disparity onto the nation’s criminal justice system.

3. Losing Our Punitive Civic Religion Much of the American legal system is based on a set of enduring myths about who are criminals and how they should be treated. Like the Covid-19 dead, the mass suffering and racial disproportionality of our highly punitive criminal justice system — police, prisons, court supervision, immigration detention — sit heavily on American society today. With prisons second only to long-term care facilities in rates of Covid-19 deaths, we might do well to recognize that they bear the very same burden in some important ways. In both transmissions and punishments, the United States has become infamous globally as the country with a single digit share (5 percent) of the world’s population, and as of February a double-digit share (20–25 percent) of both Covid-19 cases and prisoners.

Labor:

Half a Million South Korean Workers Prepare to Walk Off Jobs in General Strike On October 20, at least half a million workers in South Korea — from across the construction, transportation, service, and other sectors — will walk off their jobs in a one-day general strike. The strike will be followed by mass demonstrations in urban centers and rural farmlands, culminating in a national all-people’s mobilization in January 2022. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), the country’s largest labor union umbrella with 1.1 million members, is organizing these mobilizations in a broad-based front with South Korea’s urban poor and farmers.

World:

Welcome to Britain, The Bank Scam Capital of The World 

• Fraudsters steal $1 billion in just six months – industry data

• Tech giants in focus as crooks take advantage of social media

London, Oct 14 (Reuters) – It was an email offering a discount on an electric toothbrush that began the sequence of events that ruined Anna’s life.    Within minutes of entering her card details, she got a call from her bank telling her fraudulent transactions were being made.   The next day Robert Clayton from Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority called to say they were pursuing the criminals responsible but that her savings were at risk.    There was no toothbrush, though. No fraud department, no Robert Clayton. They were all part of a scam to gradually siphon off Anna’s life savings, and within a few weeks the plot had succeeded, to the tune of about 200,000 pounds ($270,000).

Puerto Ricans Fight Privatization of Energy and Demand Democratic Ownership Neoliberalism is not dead — it’s simply mutating. Austerity politics and privatization have been repackaged as public-private partnerships and forced upon communities without their consent. Growing communal resistance to corporate capitalism has emerged in different ways and in different places. One such place is Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans, both on the island and in the diaspora, have been mounting fierce resistance to the privatization of Puerto Rico’s electrical grid. Residents have been experiencing widespread power outages, utility price hikes, voltage fluctuations (power surges that damage appliances) and a plethora of ongoing issues since the start of the public-private partnership between Luma Energy — the U.S.-Canadian company that seized control of the island’s power transmission and distribution system — and the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) — the island’s public energy corporation, which is in charge of power generation.

Scottish Campaigner to Shell CEO: ‘You’re to Blame’ for Deadly Climate Crisis “We will never forget what you have done and what Shell has done,” and “as the climate crisis gets more and more deadly, you will be to blame,” Scottish climate campaigner Lauren MacDonald told Royal Dutch Shell CEO Ben van Beurden Thursday, during a TED Countdown Summit panel in Edinburgh.

Africa’s Disappearing Glaciers Signal ‘Irreversible’ Threat to Earth System: Report The authors of a U.N. report urge greater investment in climate adaptation and weather services on the continent. A new United Nations-backed report reveals the extent of Africa’s “disproportionate vulnerability” to the climate emergency, with the continent’s three glaciers expected to disappear entirely in the next two decades as the population faces the increasingly dire effects of the heating of the planet.

Health, 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 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!

Scientists Search for Cause of Mysterious COVID-Related Inflammation in Children More than 5,200 of the 6.2 million U.S. children diagnosed with COVID have developed MIS-C. About 80% of MIS-C patients are treated in intensive care units, 20% require mechanical ventilation, and 46 have died.   Throughout the pandemic, MIS-C has followed a predictable pattern, sending waves of children to the hospital about a month after a COVID surge. Pediatric intensive care units — which treated thousands of young patients during the late-summer delta surge — are now struggling to save the latest round of extremely sick children.