Daily News Digest January 21, 2022

Daily News Digest Archives

Humanity Will Not be Covid Free, Until the Vaccines are Free For the Whole World!

Images of the Day:

Fuhrer to Fuhrer

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:

Founding Fathers: ‘Wealthy Majority’ Rules!: AsNoam Chomsky stated in his interview on American History and Democracy: . . . If you go back to the record of the Constitutional Convention, which took place in 1787, almost immediately after the end of the war, you see that they are already moving in another direction. James Madison — who was the main framer, and one of the Founding Fathers who was most libertarian — makes it very clear that the new constitutional system must be designed so as to ensure that the government will, in his words, “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” and bar the way to anything like agrarian reform. The determination was made that America could not allow functioning democracy, since people would use their political power to attack the wealth of the minority of the opulent. Therefore, Madison argues, the country should be placed in the hands of the wealthier set of men, as he put it. . . .

Videos of the Day:

Ralph Nader: Biden’s First Year Proves He Is Still a “Corporate Socialist” Beholden to Big Business

 Water Protectors in Hawaii Confront Dangerous Environmental Polluter: The Us Military

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. Tax the Rich!  — They Can Afford to Pay!

The IDF Killed a Palestinian US Citizen. Why Is the US Doing Nothing? Assad Assad, the nephew of Omar Abdulmajeed Asad, describes his uncle as a very social and caring man. Omar immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s and became a small business owner in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He and his wife had seven children and many grandchildren, nephews and nieces. Ten years ago, Omar Asad decided to retire in the village of Jaljulia, in Ramallah, Palestine, where he was originally from. Asad loved family gatherings and regularly went around to check up on and visit relatives, according to his nephew. He attended a big family gathering on January 11 and was driving back around 2:30 am. At this time, members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — the military force that carries out the occupation of Palestine — were executing an overnight raid in Jaljulia. Night raids are a common practice by IDF soldiers, serving to intimidate Palestinians in their most vulnerable state by invading their safest places while they are sleeping.

fter Year One, Climate Group Says Biden ‘Failing Us’ “Biden can’t be the climate leader he claims to be when he is actively conducting major lease sales and lobbying oil states to produce more fossil fuels,” said the youth-led Sunrise Movement.

“World’s Greatest Deliberative Body”? Hardly The website of the US Senate notes that the Senate has been a forum for free debate and the protection of political minorities. Here, the words has been is a key point.     By its very nature, the Senate, with two Senators from each state, gives more representation to the voters of sparsely populated rural states, clearly a lopsided minority representation, and I say this as a lifelong resident of rural Wisconsin.     This vision of the Senate was bitterly debated by the framers of the Constitution, as only five of the original thirteen states supported a Senate so structured. And this was a time when the population ratio between the largest state and the smallest was 13 to 1. That ratio now stands at 68 to 1 and it is growing wider year by year

The Myth of Bi-Partisan Necessity Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) to quash President Biden’s major policy initiatives on voting rights, climate change, and social programs will not be judged favorably by history. Why? Because both senators are relying on the outworn and largely mythical belief that bipartisan cooperation is mandatory in order to make good laws or spend taxpayer money wisely. According to the two delusional Democrats, they will not vote to get rid of, even temporarily, the Senate’s ridiculous requirement that normal legislation must have the approval — and votes — of 60 of the chamber’s 100 members to advance. For those who have always been taught “majority rules” in our democracy, the Senate’s nonsensical rule to require a super majority to pass most legislation is baffling. What makes the Senate so special that “majority rules” doesn’t apply to these oh so self-important politicians?

Bipartisan Biden Builds Back Bupkis: Reflections on Biden’s Inauguration Anniversary It is not surprising that President Biden is failing on his Build Back Better and voting rights agendas. It is not surprising because Biden campaigned as the candidate who could work with the ultra-conservative, Trump-infatuated Republicans to build unity and “restore the soul of America.” Biden continued to pursue bipartisanship even after the anti-democratic Republicans tried to overthrow his election.     Bipartisan Biden’s political strategy has been as reality-challenged as Trump’s 30,000 lies in office. It is not surprising that as Biden approached the January 20th anniversary of his inauguration a Quinnipiac Poll showed that Biden’s job approval is 33% and a 58% to 37% majority of Americans believe our democracy is in danger of collapsing.     Progressive Democrats have been reality-challenged as well. Joe Biden, a lifelong neoliberal hawk, was always part of the corporate wing of the Democratic Party that has more votes in Congress than the progressive wing. But that did not stop Bernie Sanders from saying during the campaign that Biden would be the “most progressive president since FDR,” although the smart money on Wall Street didn’t buy that fantasy. Sanders co-opted progressive Democrats on to Sanders-Biden Unity Working Groups to develop Biden’s platform during the campaign, where Sanders’ progressive agenda began to be watered down.

Environment —Ecosocialism or Ecocide!:

Latest Daily CO2

  • January 18, 2022 417.30 ppm
  • January 18, 2021 415.34 ppm

 New Data Shows Massive Climate—Warming Leaks by New Mexico Oil and Gas Operators While most producers dramatically increased their reporting, the state’s largest natural gas producer’s numbers haven’t budged.     In New Mexico, new state rules sparked a dramatic increase in reported incidents of vented and flared natural gas in 2021 — and reveal that the oil and gas industry has been losing vastly more of the climate-change-driving fossil fuel than previously reported.     “The state’s updated reporting requiremenhuge amounts of vented and flared natural gas in recent years.ts were long overdue,” says Jon Goldstein, senior director of regulatory and legislative affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund.

manity at “Doom’s Doorstep” Says Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists The Doomsday Clock, a symbol of “how close we are to destroying our world,” remains at 100 seconds to midnight. Top scientists responsible for the “Doomsday Clock” issued a stark warning Thursday about how close the world is to catastrophe due to the climate emergency, nuclear weapons, and “disruptive technologies in other domains.”

Welcome to Colorado: the Land of Oil Giants and Lilliputian Regulators Remember the old quip – Eternity is two people and a ham?  People in Colorado learned a new definition the eternity late last November:  Eternity is the dull, incessant drone of Governor Polis’s new million-dollar Commission taking public comment at a Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, COGCC, rulemaking.  With the intensity one might expect of a two-year-old learning to ride a tricycle, the Commission dissected the meaning of the term ‘economic risk’ as it applies to the state’s oil industry.Who knew the term has such fluidity of meaning?  In the end, after days of back and forth, these highly paid, breathlessly bumbling amateur lexicographers turned the term into something as useless as campaign promises.

Civil rights/Black Liberation:

Black Agenda Report

Labor:

Economy:

FRED Effective Federal Funds Rate is .08%

 Is Citigroup Under Orders from Its Regulators to Break Itself Up? The last thing that Fed Chairman Powell needs in his second term are the sleazy details of the Fed’s trading scandal being released by investigators and to have to bail out the same megabank that Fed Chair Bernanke secretly bailed out from December 2007 through at least mid-July 2010. Obviously, we’re talking about Citigroup. Citigroup has been announcing major asset sales so rapidly since December that one has to wonder if the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and/or the Fed is cracking the whip. (We’ll get to the significant details of why that might be the case in a moment.)

World:

The Smearing of Emma Watson Anyone who has ever been critical of Israeli actions toward the Palestinian people knows what to expect next—an avalanche of pit-bull attacks and smears that their criticisms of Israel are motivated by racism and anti-Semitism. The latest example is the response to actress Emma Watson’s pro-Palestinian Instagram post, which led (predictably) to Israeli officials and supporters accusing her of anti-Semitism. Among many others, former Israeli UN Representative Danny Danon—in a tone-deaf post—wrote, “10 points from Gryffindor for being an antisemite.”     The purpose of such false accusations is of course to deflect attention away from what is happening on the ground—the real (war) crimes that Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinian people—to the supposed motivations of the critics. Unable to defend its criminal actions, all that Israel’s increasingly desperate defenders have left is smear and innuendo, as the attacks on Emma Watson make clear. 

Vulture Capitalism Continues in Puerto Reico: Critics Warn Puerto Rico Debt Plan Will Lead to More Austerity  rogressives and anti-austerity campaigners on Wednesday were wary of a federal judge’s ruling which wiped out 80% of Puerto Rico’s debt—the product of four years of negotiations between the U.S. territory’s government, creditors, and a fiscal control board that Puerto Ricans derisively call “la junta.” While Gov. Pedro Pierluisi said the debt restructuring plan, which reduces $33 billion of the island’s debt to $7.4 billion, will be “very good for Puerto Rico” and will “serve our people,” critics said the plan will do little to help future generations of workers on the island while allowing some Wall Street hedge funds which previously bought up the debt to profit off of the deal.

Education, Health, 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!

 Students Are Walking Out of School Rather Than Returning to an Unsafe “Normal” The upsurge of student protests across the U.S. is a reaction to a nationwide “return to normal,” no matter the cost.

Omicron Supply-Chain Disruptions Are Hitting Low-Income Communities the Hardest When the supply of essential goods gets scarce, poorer countries and individuals get frozen out of the market