Daily News Digest December 31, 2021
Humanity Will Not be Covid Free, Until the Vaccines are Free For the Whole World!
Images of the Day:
Mike Luckovich: An important List
Another Example Capitalism as a Failed System: World Capilalism Ws 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!
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”, is Still True for Today’s World!
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! 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:
The easier it is to obtain advances on unsold commodities, the more such advances are taken, and the greater the temptation to manufacture commodities, or dump already manufactured commodities in distant markets, just to obtain advances of money on them. To what extent the entire business world of a country may be seized by such swindling, and what it finally comes to, is amply illustrated by the history of English business during 1845-47. It shows us what credit can accomplish. — Capital, Chapter 25. Credit and Fictitious Capital
Pardon me, – the stranger responded gently, – but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period, well, say, a thousand years , but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow? And in fact, – here the stranger turned to Berlioz, – imagine that you, for instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally, so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get …hem … hem … lung cancer … – here the foreigner smiled sweetly, and if the thought of lung cancer gave him pleasure — yes, cancer — narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word —and so your governing is over! You are no longer interested in anyone’s fate but your own. Your family starts lying to you. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well. Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box, and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good for anything, burn him in an oven. And sometimes it’s worse still: the man has just decided to go to Kislovodsk – here the foreigner squinted at Berlioz – a trifling matter, it seems, but even this he cannot accomplish, because suddenly, no one knows why, he slips and falls under a tram-car! Are you going to say it was he who governed himself that way? Would it not be more correct to think that he was governed by someone else entirely?” — Mikhail Bulgakov
Videos of the Day:
Noam Chomsky: Corporate Patents & Rising Anti-Science Rhetoric Will Prolong Pandemic
Noam Chomsky on Rising Fascism in U.S., Class Warfare & the Climate Emergency
Poet Martín Espada on “Floaters,” the Dehumanization of Refugees, Puerto Rico & His Father
Unpatented Shot Dubbed ‘The World’s Covid-19 Vaccine’ Wins Emergency Approval in India
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 and who profit from war and the war budget, vote 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. Rax the Rich! — They Can Afford To Pay
What Covid Pandemoc,Econcide and Dim Psopects fothe Futre Breeds: The Grimmest Milestone that America Ignored this Year In the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of overdose deaths surged past 100,000 for the first time in 2021. Much like the previous year, 2021 was a constant deluge of news: much of it bad (failed insurrection, the persistence of a deadly pandemic, etc.), some of it good (vaccines, boosters, etc.), and almost all of it overwhelming. It was a year of grim milestones, such that the phrase “grim milestone” itself became a cliché incapable of capturing the breathtaking devastation wrought by phenomena such as the pandemic and natural disasters. The presence of the pandemic in our lives likely kept one such horrifying development off the front page: This year’s surge in drug overdose deaths, which for the first time climbed past 100,000 in the 12-month period ending in April 2021. The numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, released in November, articulate a devastating new record of predicted deaths that came amid Covid-19’s ravages. The provisional number was a 28.5 percent increase from the 78,000 deaths in the prior year, with 75 percent of overdose deaths caused by opioids, mostly of the synthetic variety. As of early December, the predicted number of deaths for the 12-month period ending in May 2021 was slightly lower, but still above the 100,000 mark. (The number of reported deaths was slightly under 100,000 for both periods of time, but according to the NCHS, these numbers were underreported due to incomplete data.) “I was expecting that the numbers would look bad,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the medical director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. “But it got even worse than I anticipated. Significantly worse.”
Environment:
‘Do Look Up!’: Ocean Heating This Century Could Create Hurricane Conditions Unseen in 3 Million Years: Study The study’s authors say the likelihood of higher-latitude tropical storms fueled by human-caused global heating “poses profound risks to the planet’s most populous regions Global heating caused by human activity could warm oceans enough to fuel hurricanes and tropical storms that strike cities as far north as Boston, a new study published Wednesday projects. “This represents an important, under-estimated risk of climate change,” Joshua Studholme of Yale University, the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “This research predicts that the 21st century’s tropical cyclones will likely occur over a wider range of latitudes than has been the case on Earth for the last 3 million years.”
New Documentary Explains Extreme Weather Emergency The new PBS documentary “Earth Emergency” is essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand extreme weather’s causes and what can be done about it. Emmy-nominated director Susan Gray’s timely documentary, Earth Emergency, is not only a wake-up call to policymakers and the public, but a sort of “Extreme Weather for Dummies” that explains the fatal factors wreaking havoc on our environment. This fifty-two-minute nonfiction film uses animation and explanatory superimpositions of words and symbols over images to illustrate the points being made onscreen by climate experts and notables, along with insightful narration by actor Richard Gere.
Climate Chaos: What to Learn From 2021 To keep acting as if there wasn’t war declared against the planet and humanity is to accept we are already defeated. Continuing to play their game can only guarantee collapse. It’s time to flip the table.
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
We’re Talking About Power—Who Has It and Who Gets Kicked in the Face by It Mass corporate consolidations in manufacturing, hospitals, newspapers, hardware stores, farm equipment dealers and practically all other sectors mean local job opportunities shrivel to one place paying a low wage … or take a hike! Blatant racial discrimination has driven hundreds of thousands of good, Black farmers off the land.
Labor:
From these facts about two known carcinogens and one probable carcinogen, common in paints, one can tell that OSHA can not prevent occupational cancer. Especially in painters who are exposed to over 150 known and suspected carcinogens and over 3000 hazardous substances daily. As you can see people getting cancer is part of the equation; OSHA pel’s are at least ten times higher than NIOSH; therefore, the OSHA “feasible” (In the video Before Their Time (about workers dying of cancer) produced by the Workers Health and Sfaety Centre, Ontario Canada, Peter Infante, Director of Standards for OSHA, stated that NIOSH includes one more cancer per 1000 workers exposed as feasible.) risk for cancer is at least ten times higher. — This is the usual difference between NIOSH and OSHA.) — The War at the Point of Production: The ‘Killing Fields’ of the United States
OSHA Pulls Protections As Healthcare Worker Deaths Rise The Wrong Decision at the Wrong Time The Biden administration has just thrown the most its most important assets in the fight against COVID-19 under the bus. Monday evening, OSHA announced “that it is withdrawing the non-recordkeeping portions of the healthcare ETS.” That ETS, or Emergency Temporary Standard, was issued by OSHA last June to protect healthcare workers from contracting COVID-19. The healthcare ETS was a comprehensive standard requiring covered healthcare employers to conduct a hazard assessment, and develop and implement a written COVID-19 plan to mitigate virus spread. It also required healthcare employers to provide employees with N95 respirators or other personal protective equipment. It contained physical distancing and barrier requirements, as well as requirements for enhanced ventilation and employee training. It also had requirements covering health screening and medical management in addition to paid leave for vaccination.
Flight Attendant Union Criticizes CDC for Decision “Pushed by Corporate America” Flight Attendant union president and labor leader Sara Nelson is criticizing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for changing its guidance on quarantining for COVID-19 after business leaders asked the agency to cut its recommendations by half, potentially at the cost of public health. Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA International, accused the CDC in a statement of making its decision to benefit businesses that may be experiencing staffing issues, rather than stemming the spread of the virus. “We said we wanted to hear from medical professionals on the best guidance for quarantine, not from corporate America advocating for a shortened period due to staffing shortages,” Nelson said. “The CDC gave a medical explanation about why the agency has decided to reduce the quarantine requirements from 10 to five days, but the fact that it aligns with the number of days pushed by corporate America is less than reassuring.”
Economy:
FRED: Federal Funds Effective Rate is 0.08% 
These Are the Plunging Charts that the New York Stock Exchange Hopes You Won’t See The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has had its share of scandals. There was the late 1930s when former NYSE President Richard Whitney went to prison for embezzlement. In 2004 New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer took the NYSE and its former Chairman and CEO, Richard Grasso, to court over charges of violating New York State non-profit law by giving an obscene $187.5 million pay package to Grasso. In 2014 bestselling author Michael Lewis went on 60 Minutes to report that “the United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism, is rigged” after writing a very convincing book, “Flash Boys,” explaining exactly how it was rigged. (We could go on and on but you get the point.) We want to go on the record, here and now, that the past scandals of the New York Stock Exchange are going to look like minor hiccups when the history of the current New York Stock Exchange era is written. The listing standards for companies that the New York Stock
The Fed Is About to Reveal Which Wall Street Banks Needed $4.5 Trillion in Repo Loans in Q4 2019 The conventional wisdom is that the Fed’s recent emergency lending facilities to Wall Street were caused by the COVID-19 crisis. The above chart, which uses the New York Fed’s own Excel spreadsheet repo loan data, shows the conventional wisdom is dangerously wrong. In the last quarter of 2019 – before there was any news of COVID-19 in the U.S., and months before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic – the Fed pumped $4.5 trillion in cumulative repo loans to unnamed trading houses on Wall Street – its so-called “primary dealers.”
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 they 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
Profits First — Health and Welfare Last!: After CDC Change It Lobbied For, Delta Slashes Paid Sick Leave for Workers With Covid “You almost can’t make up a more heinous story than this,” said one epidemiologist. Just a day after the CDC delivered updated Covid-19 isolation guidelines that the company’s CEO lobbied for, Delta Air Lines moved to take advantage of the new recommendations by slashing paid sick leave for infected workers, prompting immediate backlash from union leaders and public health experts who warned of such an outcome.
As Covid Deaths Hit 800K, Sanders Says Medicare for All Needed to End ‘Vulgarity’ of US Health System “The pandemic has demonstrated that a privatized healthcare system cannot ensure the health of the population.” Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday said that nearly two years after the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the public health crisis that shows no sign of coming to a swift end has brought into stark relief “the vulgarity” of the U.S. healthcare system, suggesting the political establishment must end its defense of the for-profit healthcare industry as he re-upped his call for Medicare for All.