Daily News Digest October 25, 2021

Daily News Digest October 25, 2021

Daily News Digest Archives

Images of the Day:

Capitalists to the World: Burn Baby Burn!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:

Robbing the PoorVideos of the Day:

On Contact: Neofascist seizure of America’s state governments

Trauma & Transformation in an American Prison, Part 1

On Contact: Trauma & Transformation in an American Prison, Part 2

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!

Secretive House Caucus Is Appointing Corporate Democrats to Key Committee Seats  How did Democrats in the House of Representatives decide that the top House recipient of corporate PAC money should run the tax code-writing committee, or that the top recipient of defense industry cash in their caucus should be in charge of Armed Services? There’s no way to know, because House Democrats have not made public the rules that govern its powerful Steering and Policy Committee, which nominates committee chairmen and the Democratic members of all committees besides Rules and Administration, which get chosen by the speaker. In fact, the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee has not even released its list of members.

Guaranteeing Humanicide: US Plastics Industry Will Have More Emissions Than Coal by 2030, New Report Says With dozens of new plastics manufacturing and recycling facilities in the works, the U.S. plastics industry will release more greenhouse gas emissions than coal-fired power plants by 2030, say the authors of a new report. Emissions from the plastics sector equaled that of 116 coal-fired power plants last year, according to the report out Thursday from Bennington College’s Beyond Plastics project. Meanwhile, 42 plastics manufacturing and recycling facilities have opened, or are in the process of being built or permitted, since 2019

More  “Blah, Blah, Blah!”: White House Climate-Related Financial Risk Report Denounced as “Pitiful” Failure  After months of waiting, environmental groups responded with disappointment tinged with outrage late Thursday after the White House released a report on the financial risks associated with the climate crisis — a document critics say would have been promising at some earlier point in history but that falls “pitifully” short given the urgency of the crisis and just ahead of a major U.N.-backed summit kicking off at the end of the month.     “It’s extremely disappointing to see this long-awaited report be so watered down by what can only be described as climate apathetic FSOC members,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, in response to the “Report on Climate-Related Financial Risk” issued by the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which was created via executive order by President Joe Biden.Environment:              

In Face of Planetary Emergency, US Climate-Related Financial Risk Report Denounced as ‘Pitiful’ Failure “Finding consensus between those who see or don’t see our climate reality,” said one critic, “is not democracy in action: it’s homicidal.” After months of waiting, environmental groups responded with disappointment tinged with outrage late Thursday after the White House released a report on the financial risks associated with the climate crisis—a document critics say would have been promising at some earlier point in history but that falls “pitifully” short given the urgency of the crisis and just ahead of a major U.N.-backed summit kicking off at the end of the month.‘Compromising’ on Climate Is Horrible Politics, Deadly Policy, and Stupid Economics At this stage, Democrats have offered Joe Manchin a basket full of polluter-friendly subsidies to prop up essentially non-existent carbon capture power technology, a watered-down clean power plan barely better than the status quo, or a meaningless carbon tax that mostly exists as a totem for an industry that pretends to care about the planetary damage it has caused.

Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:

Public Health Hazzards  — “The Men in Blue’!: As Cops, Prison Guards and Airport Workers Resist Vaccines, Showdowns Loom  More than a third of Chicago’s police force of nearly 13,000 are defying a city mandate to report their vaccination status and face disciplinary action as a result. The city is among multiple municipalities and states where officers, prison guards and airport safety workers are resisting COVID-19 vaccines.

When Prison Guards Refuse Vaccines, Incarcerated People Pay the Price Tensions are reaching a boiling point as large swaths of prison guards continue to refuse COVID-19 vaccines despite mandates in some states for public sector employees. Vaccination rates for prison staff members range from 23 percent in Alabama to 78 percent in Colorado, and average 55 percent amongst jurisdictions that have reported data.

How Prosecutors Use Conspiracy and Questionable Testimony in “Gang” Cases In the United States, it is estimated that about two people are wrongfully convicted every day. In 2014, the Innocence Project estimated that around 120,000 people incarcerated in state prisons were wrongfully convicted. More than half of wrongful convictions, one study found, were the result of official misconduct by police officers, prosecutors — or both.

Race And Wrongful Convictions in The United States Executive Summary: African Americans are only 13% of the American population but a majority of innocent defendants wrongfully convicted of crimes and later exonerated. They constitute 47% of the 1,900 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations (as of October 2016), and the great majority of more than 1,800 additional innocent defendants who were framed and convicted of crimes in 15 large-scale police scandals and later cleared in “group exonerations.” We see this racial disparity for all major crime categories, but we examine it in this report in the context of the three types of crime that produce the largest numbers of exonerations in the Registry: murder, sexual assault, and drug crimes.

1. Murder Judging from exonerations, innocent black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people. A major cause of the high number of black murder exonerations is the high homicide rate in the black community—a tragedy that kills many African Americans and sends many others to prison. Innocent defendants who are falsely convicted and exonerated do not contribute to this high homicide rate. They— like the families of victims who are killed—are deeply harmed by murders committed by others. . . .

2. Sexual Assault Judging from exonerations, a black prisoner serving time for sexual assault is threeand-a-half times more likely to be innocent than a white sexual assault convict. The major cause for this huge racial disparity appears to be the high danger of mistaken eyewitness identification by white victims in violent crimes with black assailants. . . .

3. Drug Crimes The best national evidence on drug use shows that African Americans and whites use illegal drugs at about the same rate. Nonetheless, African Americans are about five times as likely to go to prison for drug possession as whites—and judging from exonerations, innocent black people are about 12 times more likely to be convicted of drug crimes than innocent white people. . .

Labor:

Leon Trotsky foretold the ‘Partnership’ Between the Trade Bureaucracy and the Boss:  From Leon Trotsky and the Iron Heel:  If one took the trouble to look over the reviews of The Iron Heel at that time in the German Neue Zeit and Vorwärts, in the Austrian Kampf and Arbeiterzeitung, as well as in the other socialist publications of Europe and America, he could easily convince himself that the thirty-year-old “romanticist” saw incomparably more clearly and farther than all the social-democratic leaders of that time taken together. But Jack London bears comparison in this domain not only with the reformists. One can say with assurance that in 1907 not one of the revolutionary Marxists, not excluding Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, imagined so fully the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capital and labor aristocracy. This suffices in itself to determine the specific weight of the novel. — The Fall of the Trade Unions

In the 1980s, the AFL-CIO Agreed to a ‘Partnership (Domestic)’ With the Capitalist Class and to ‘Police’ Local Areas That Did Not Genuflect to Capitalism!:

AFL-CIO Leadership Tries To Block Affiliate’s Vote On Endorsing BDS  AFL-CIO leadership cited a procedural rule to tell the San Francisco Labor Council it couldn’t even debate a resolution on BDS. THE NATIONAL LEADERSHIP of the largest labor federation in the country is trying to stop one of its affiliates from debating and voting on a resolution that condemns Israeli violence against Palestinians, calls for an end to U.S. aid to Israel, and endorses the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement known as BDS. In late September, an AFL-CIO official sent a memo to the San Francisco Labor Council with the subject line “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Resolution.” The memo, obtained by The Intercept, said the council “may not hold a vote on [the] resolution and thus any debate is not germane at your meeting,” and it cited a procedural stipulation that appears to disallow local affiliates of the AFL-CIO from codifying positions that do not align with the AFL-CIO’s. Copied on the letter are the AFL-CIO’s highest-ranking officials: president, executive vice vice president, general counsel, and several directors.

Economy:

A Forensic Look at Jerome Powell’s “Pants on Fire” Explanation for His $1 Million to $5 Million Stock Sale On Monday, October 18, the fearless Robert Kuttner at the American Prospect, broke the news that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell had sold between $1 million and $5 million of the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund on October 1, 2020, the same day that Powell had been on four phone calls with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who was coordinating the White House response to the financial crisis resulting from the pandemic.     The story went viral and forced the Federal Reserve to offer a preposterously lame excuse for what was obviously a desire by Powell to reduce his exposure to the stock market, despite his having access to more insider information than any other human on the planet. The same day that Kuttner’s story ran, Mike Derby, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, wrote that a Fed representative had characterized the large Vanguard sale as “for family expenses.”World:

Berlin: Majority Want Expropriation of Real Estate Companies In a referendum on 26 September, a million people in Berlin voted for the expropriation of the major landlords. In the so-called “Deutsche Wohnen & co enteigen” (DWE) referendum (which in English translates as “Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen and co.”), 56 percent of voters voted to expropriate 240,000 apartments owned by the biggest profiteering landlords, including Deutsche Wohnen, with 39 percent voting against. This is the biggest breakthrough in the class struggle in Germany for decades. It gives a flavour of the militant mood building among workers and youth. A crisis Decades in the Making In Germany, half of all residents live in rented accommodation. In large cities, the number is even higher: on average, 75 percent of urban dwellers rent their homes. Since the financial crisis of 2008, rents have skyrocketed as investors around the world, unable to find profitable avenues of investment, threw their money into the “safe haven” of property speculation. This has led to a familiar trend in many so-called “global cities” like London, New York, Toronto, Tel Aviv and Berlin – skyrocketing house prices and rents that are actually pricing out the working-class residents who keep these cities going.Disaster Capitalism:  80 Million European Households Struggle to Stay Warm. Rising Energy Costs Will Make The Problem Worse (Europe is Paying Record Prices For Energy. A Winter Crisis Looms) London (CNN Business)Millions of people across Europe may not be able to afford to heat their homes this winter as gas and electricity prices soar. Experts, anti-poverty organizations and environmental campaigners are warning that the coronavirus pandemic and rising prices have intensified a longstanding problem tied to a combination of high energy costs, low household incomes and homes that aren’t energy efficient. Recent research led by Stefan Bouzarovski, professor at the University of Manchester and chair of energy poverty research network Engager, found that up to 80 million households across Europe were already struggling to keep their homes adequately warm before the pandemic.

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!

Along with global warming, the increasing pollution of the oceans, the fresh water, the land, and the air throughout the world has put into question the future of our species and other species.:  Fide Castrol: Speech to Earth Summit 1992An important biological species is in danger of disappearing due to the fast and progressive destruction of its natural living conditions: mankind. We have now become aware of this problem when it is almost too late to stop it.   It is necessary to point out that consumer societies are fundamentally responsible for the brutal destruction of the environment. They arose from the old colonial powers and from imperialist policies which in turn engendered the backwardness and poverty, which today afflicts the vast majority of mankind.

With only 20 percent of the world’s population, these societies consume two-thirds of the metals and three-fourths of the energy produced in the world. They have poisoned the seas and rivers, polluted the air, weakened and punctured the ozone layer, saturated the atmosphere with gases which are changing weather conditions with a catastrophic effect we are already beginning to experience.

The forests are disappearing. The deserts are expanding.  Every year thousands of millions of tons of fertile soil end up in the sea. Numerous species are becoming extinct. Population pressures and poverty trigger frenzied efforts to survive even when it is at the expense of the environment.

It is not possible to blame the Third World countries for this. Yesterday, they were colonies; today, they are nations exploited and pillaged by an unjust international economic order. The solution cannot be to prevent the development of those who need it most. The reality is that anything that nowadays contributes to underdevelopment and poverty constitutes a flagrant violation of ecology. Tens of millions of men, women, and children die every year in the Third World as a result of this, more than in each of the two world wars.

Unequal terms of trade, protectionism, and the foreign debt assault the ecology and promote the destruction of the environment. If we want to save mankind from this self-destruction, we have to better distribute the wealth and technologies available in the world. Less luxury and less waste by a few countries is needed so there is less poverty and less hunger on a large part of the Earth. We do not need any more transferring to the Third World of lifestyles and consumption habits that ruin the environment. Let human life become more rational. Let us implement a just international economic order. Let us use all the science necessary for pollution-free, sustained development. Let us pay the ecological debt, and not the foreign debt.

Let hunger disappear, and not mankind.   Now that the alleged threat of communism has disappeared and there are no longer any more excuses for cold wars, arms races, and military spending, what is blocking the immediate use of these resources to promote the development of the Third World and fight the threat of the ecological destruction of the planet? Let selfishness end. Let hegemonies end. Let insensitivity, irresponsibility, and deceit end. Tomorrow it will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago!”