Daily News Digest March 30, 2092
Humanity Will Not be Covid Free, Until the Vaccines, Like the Salk Polio Vaccine, are Free For the Whole World
Images of the Day:
Bendib: All Ukrainian
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:
In 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the GI Bill into law. In theory, the GI Bill represented a promise from the country to the people who fought on its behalf that their sacrifice would be rewarded with the opportunity to attend college and build generational wealth. In practice, generations of Black veterans of World War II and their descendants were robbed of this promise because of Jim Crow and the wide racial disparity in the bill’s implementation. — Clyburn, Moulton Introduce Landmark Legislation to Provide Black Wwii Veterans, Descendants Full Gi Bill Benefits; Warnock to Introduce in Senate
Videos of the Day:
The For-Profit Companies Charging Prisoners to Read Their Own Mail According to The Sentencing Project, “Private prisons in the United States incarcerated 115,428 people in 2019, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population.” However, while private prisons still make up a minority of carceral institutions in the US, the infiltration of privatization has spread throughout the prison-industrial complex. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with Paul Wright about the dehumanizing practice of prisons digitizing mail, which allows for increased surveillance, and for profit-seeking companies to charge inmates and their families exorbitant fees to read mail on electric portals.
Weather Briefly: Tornadoes Weather Briefly is a short-form series highlighting the many types of severe weather along with research being done by NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory
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 th poor and gives to the Rich. Taxthe Rich! — They Can Afford to Pay!
We Do Not Need a Massive Increase’: Sanders Criticizes Biden’s $813 Billion Military Budget The chair of the Senate Budget Committee noted that the US already spends more on its military than “the next 11 countries combined.” Biden Wants to Give 163 Times More to US Military Than to Global Pandemic Response “Failing to fund the global fight against Covid-19 is a choice to extend the pandemic,” said one public health expert. One day after President Joe Biden asked Congress to approve a record-shattering $813 billion U.S. military budget, public health advocates are lamenting that his Fiscal Year 2023 spending blueprint requests roughly 163 times less funding to help mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic on a global scale.
‘Possible Coverup’ Alleged as Jan. 6 Logs Show 457-Minute Gap in Trump Calls “Nixon had an 18.5-minute gap in his White House tapes,” noted one watchdog group. “Trump has a 7.5-hour gap in phone logs from January 6th.” Internal White House documents handed over to a House panel investigating the January 6 Capitol attack show a gap of seven hours and 37 minutes in former President Donald Trump’s call logs from that day, raising suspicions that Trump allies are illegally concealing his phone records from lawmakers. The Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward and CBS News’ Robert Costa reported Tuesday that “the lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes on January 6, 2021—from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m.—means the committee has no record of his phone conversations as his supporters descended on the Capitol, battled overwhelmed police, and forcibly entered the building, prompting lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to flee for safety.”
Ukraine: The Refugee Crisis and the Hypocrisy of the West In order to score political points against Putin’s Russia, western governments are cynically expressing their support for Ukrainian refugees. But these hypocrites and their system are the root of the problem. The solution is socialist revolution. Over three million people have now fled Ukraine since Russia’s invasion on 24 February, with the UN declaring this the fastest-growing refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War. . . . The EU border force, Frontex, has drawn an iron ring around the EU in recent years, allowing thousands of refugees fleeing imperialist wars in the Middle East to drown in the Mediterranean. They have paid Erdogan to stuff refugees into squalid camps, and have fired tear gas to repulse African refugees trying to enter the Spanish territory of Ceuta. Meanwhile, the Biden administration still routinely separates children from their parents at the Mexican border.
US Oil Companies Set to Reap Up to $126 Billion in Extra Profits Amid War on Ukraine “It’s high time for Congress to pass a windfall profits tax and prevent the fossil fuel industry from harnessing a war to make billions,” said one campaigner. A new analysis released Tuesday estimates that U.S. oil and gas corporations are poised to rake in windfall profits of up to $126 billion this year as they exploit Russia’s deadly assault on Ukraine to raise prices at the pump.
Environment —Ecosocialism or Ecocide!
We Should Be Fighting the Climate Emergency, Not Another War The planet needs global cooperation to heal from the damage humanity has wrought—more war is the opposite of what Humanity needs. What do a six-year-old in the United States and an 85-year-old in Russia have in common besides being on opposite sides of a war? They’re both feeling the strain of a warming planet. “Is the earth going to get so hot that we can’t survive?” my young son asked me last summer as we plodded through the woods behind our Maryland home.
Tornadoes and Climate Change: Why Dixie is the New Tornado Alley Tornadoes tore up homes in New Orleans and its suburbs and were reported in communities fromTexas to Mississippi and Alabama as severe storms swept across the South in late March 2022. We asked tornado scientist Ernest Agee to explain what causes tornadoes and how the center of U.S. tornado activity has shifted eastward from the traditional Tornado Alley in recent years. US Oil Companies Invade EU Oil Market: Wars? It’s About Oil! US Plan to Provide 15bn Cubic Meters of Natural Gas to EU Alarms Climate Groups The deal is intended to decrease reliance on Russia but will entrench reliance on fossil fuels, environmentalists say A major deal that will see the US ramp up its supply of gas to Europe in an attempt to shift away from Russian fossil fuel imports risks “disaster” for the climate crisis, environmental groups have warned. Under the agreement, unveiled on Friday, the US will provide an extra 15bn cubic meters of liquified natural gas (LNG) to the European Union this year. This represents about a tenth of the gas the EU now gets from Russia, which provides 40% of the bloc’s total gas supply.
Scientists Alarmed as East Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapses A New-York-City-sized ice shelf has collapsed in East Antarctica, much to the alarm of scientists who thought the region was substantially protected from the impacts of climate change, unlike the more vulnerable western reaches of the continent. Captured on satellite images, the collapse of the 1,200-square-kilometre Glenzer Conger ice shelf happened at the start of “a freakish warm spell” last week, when temperatures in some parts of East Antarctica soared more than 40°C warmer than normal, reports the Associated Press. The mercury rose to a balmy -11.8°C, the Guardian reports, attributing the spike to an atmospheric river trapping heat over the entire continent. (Canadian readers will recall how British Columbia suffered catastrophic harm last November when another atmospheric river settled over the province for days, delivering never-before-seen levels of precipitation.)
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
CIA Used Prisoner as ‘Prop’ to Teach Torture Methods While the US and its allies decry Russia’s brutality in Ukraine, a recently declassified report has shed light on some of the practices of western imperialism. It has been revealed that the CIA spent three years using a detainee in Afghanistan as a ‘puppet’ to train interrogators in torture methods. This individual was subject to senseless brutality, despite providing no useful intelligence. Ammar al-Baluchi, a Pakistani national with links to the 9/11 attacks, was held in the so-called Salt Pit: an ‘extralegal’ detention centre or ‘black site’ from 2003 to 2006. There, he faced all kinds of physical and psychological torment, before being moved to the infamous Guantanamo Bay, where he has been held without trial ever since. Anmar’s ordeal has left him with potentially severe brain damage.
When Jim Crow Greeted Black Veterans I figured I’d better write this column while doing so is still legal (at least I think it is), but I don’t recommend reading it aloud in a third-grade classroom. There’s a piece of legislation sitting in the House Veterans Affairs Committee — H.R. 5905 — that cuts a swath 75 years deep into American history and attempts to undo the sort of wrong we’re no longer supposed to talk about in the classroom. Introduced in November by Reps. James Clyburn and Seth Moulton, the bill, called the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act of 2021, would give black veterans of World War II, or . . . uh, their descendants . . . the benefits of the famous GI Bill, signed by FDR in 1944, that they were denied at the time. Belated thank you for your service! In essence, the bill would finally allow African American vets from the Great War, or their direct descendants, access to loan assistance to buy a house and/or attend college. Clyburn puts it this way on his website:
Kathy Hochul Is Ready to Spend Millions on New Police Surveillance New York state legislators have just days to question phone hacking, forensics, and fusion centers before the budget passes. In january, when New York City Mayor Eric Adams released his highly publicized inaugural “blueprint” to combat gun violence, it set the stage for political commotion. His plans for ramped up policing — including new gun detection technology, increased patrols, and the redeployment of a notorious plainclothes unit — have drawn condemnation from advocates and activists, and praise from mainstream pundits, fueling the ongoing debate over cops’ role in communities.
Labor:
Economy:
Without Registering as Stock Exchanges, Citadel Securities and Virtu Financial Account for More Stock Trading than the New York Stock Exchange The above headline regarding Citadel Securities and Virtu Financial comes from a report authored by John Detrixhe that was published at Quartz in February of last year. The report found that as of December 2020 the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) had a 19.9 percent share of stock market trading versus 13.4 for Citadel Securities and 9.4 percent for Virtu Financial. This gave Citadel Securities and Virtu a combined stock market trading share of 22.8 percent versus 19.9 for the NYSE. The big problem with this picture is that neither Citadel Securities or Virtu Financial are registered as stock exchanges and neither are regulated by the SEC as stock exchanges. Citadel Securities is a broker-dealer that pays for order flow from at least nine online brokerage firms and has a dubious history of regulatory fines and abusive behavior. Virtu Financial is a market maker and high frequency trading firm that bragged in its IPO prospectus that it had only one losing day in 1,238 days of trading.
World:
Record Profits And Rising Poverty – Expropriate the Energy Monopolies! Demonstrations are taking place this weekend over the cost-of-living crisis facing the working class, with household energy bills set to jump in April, and prices skyrocketing across the board. We say: Fight inflation with expropriation! Workers are feeling the squeeze of the cost-of-living crisis, with energy bills set to soar in April. This will plunge an estimated six million households into fuel poverty – the highest level since 1996. As many as a quarter of a million of the UK’s poorest households will be unable to access Rishi Sunak’s meagre £200 energy bill loan due to outdated prepayment metres. Big business bosses, meanwhile, have spent the winter showing just how completely out of touch and out of ideas they really are – all the while continuing to pay out billions to shareholders.
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!