Daily News Digest April 11, 2022
Humanity Will Not be Covid Free, Until the Vaccines, Like the Salk Polio Vaccine, are Free For the Whole World
Images of the Day:
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!
Videos of the Day:
Global Warming: Humanity is Out of Time!: To Secure a Liveable Future, We Need Emergency Action!
UK Energy Plan Boosts Nuclear and Offshore Oil, Ignores Cheapest Paths to Cutting Carbon
Quotes of the Day:
Ah yes, Biden’s U.S. Attorney General Garland, that perfectly named inert decorative object. Once, his name was a conjuring word encapsulating the serial misdeeds of Mitch McConnell. Now, denied a seat on the high court, Garland has become perhaps the most frustrating person in the District of Columbia. The January 6 committee has been stacking damning evidence outside his door for months now with little to show for it. Aside from catching COVID, the only newsworthy act Garland has done to date is to prevent an entirely different congressional committee from fully investigating the boxes of classified material that somehow waddled from the White House to Mar-a-Lago when Donald Trump finally left office: — Why Is Merrick Garland (Biden) Throttling the Trump Investigation?
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!
A Historic Document: A Bill Of Rights For Working People : (1976)
The 1976 Socialist Workerst Party Campain Platform is still appropriate for today. Workers Still Neeed o Bill of Rights for Working People!
- America is in a developing crisis. The quality of life for most people is going from bad to worse. And the present system offers no hope for the better.
- There is no end to wars—one after another since the end of World War If. After Korea came Vietnam; now the Middle East is like a powder keg.
- Huge stockpiles of atomic weapons are a constant reminder of the threat of nuclear war.
- Pollution is destroying our environment—from the water we drink to the air we breathe.
Drop in Life Expectancy ‘Speaks Volumes’ About How US Handled Covid: Expert “While other high-income countries saw their life expectancy increase in 2021, recovering about half of their losses, U.S. life expectancy continued to fall,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, co-author of the new study. The paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, shows that U.S. life expectancy fell from 78.86 years in 2019 to 76.99 years in 2020 and 76.60 years in 2021, a net loss of 2.26 years.
Biden’s 2023 Budget Could Have Made Child Care Free. Instead, It Boosts Police. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t speaking rhetorically when he urged the U.S. to “undergo a radical revolution of values.” In fact, he spoke quite plainly when he declared that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Fifty-five years later, our nation’s triple evils that King so famously promulgated — racism, poverty and militarism — manifest in President Joe Biden’s most significant value statement: his budget.Widely considered a wish list, a spending package is a reflection of a president’s policy priorities — who gets what, when and why. “My dad has an expression,” Biden quipped as he introduced his 2023 budget. “He said, ‘don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value.’” The Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young echoed the same. “Budgets are value statements. They’re about the kind of country we want to be and the type of future we want to leave our kids.”
Environment —Ecosocialism or Ecocide!:
Fight Climate Emergency by Nationalizing US Fossil Fuel Industry, Says Top Economist “If we are finally going to start taking the IPCC’s findings seriously, it follows that we must begin advancing far more aggressive climate stabilization solutions than anything that has been undertaken thus far,” writes Robert Pollin. In the wake of a United Nations report that activists said showed the “bleak and brutal truth” about the climate emergency, a leading economist on Friday highlighted a step that supporters argue could be incredibly effective at combating the global crisis: nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry.
Solar Panels That Can Generate Electricity at Night Have Been Developed at Stanford team of engineers at Stanford University have developed a solar cell that can generate some electricity at night. The research comes at a moment when the number of solar jobs and residential installations are rising. While standard solar panels can provide electricity during the day, this device can serve as a “continuous renewable power source for both day- and nighttime,” according to the study published this week in the journal Applied Physics Letters. team of engineers at Stanford University have developed a solar cell that can generate some electricity at night. The research comes at a moment when the number of solar jobs and residential installations are rising. While standard solar panels can provide electricity during the day, this device can serve as a “continuous renewable power source for both day- and nighttime,” according to the study published this week in the journal Applied Physics Letters.
ExxonMobil to the World: Burn Baby Burn! ExxonMobil Announces $10 Billion Oil Investment the Same Day IPCC Signals End for Fossil Fuels The oil giant’s massive plan to drill in Guyana’s waters comes as the UN Secretary General warns of fossil fuels as a “blight on investment portfolios.” “Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released part of its latest report on Monday. This scientific summary, focused on how the world can cut greenhouse gas emissions, warns of the extraordinary harm to all of humanity caused by fossil fuels and the need for a rapid energy transition away from oil, gas, and coal, calling for meaningful changes over the next three years. “Such investments will soon be stranded assets, a blot on the landscape, and a blight on investment portfolios.” That same day, oil giant ExxonMobil made an announcement of its own: a $10 billion final investment decision for an oil and gas development project in the South American nation of Guyana that the company said would allow it to add a quarter of a million barrels of oil a day to its production in 2025.
Roaming Charges: News From Never-Neverland They seem to come with the seasons (what’s left of them) now: urgent dispatches on the unraveling of the earth’s climate system. Each one direr than the last. Each warning met with shrugs and political indifference. It’s not hard to understand why. After decades of prophecies, the climate Apocalypse has slowly and inexorably arrived. We are living it. Being burned and flooded and parched by it. The old nihilism has become the new realism–for anyone paying attention. What needs to be done? Nothing less than a revolution in the way the world’s economy functions and the fuels that drive it. What can be done? Not much. What will be done? Almost nothing. That’s my read on the latest (and reportedly the final) consensus report from the IPCC, a document reads less like the Book of Revelations than an after-bombing damage assessment. The bottom-line is that the 1.5C warming goal set by the panel in 2015 is obsolete. It’s unattainable. Defunct. Moreover, it’s always been unattainable. The international plans to slow global warming from Kyoto to Paris would not have been able to keep the climate below that threshold, even had they been fully-implemented. Needless to say, they haven’t been fully implemented. Far from it.
NOAA Says Atmospheric Methane Levels Set New Record in 2021 “Our data show that global emissions continue to move in the wrong direction at a rapid pace. The evidence is consistent, alarming, and undeniable.” Climate scientists on Thursday stressed the need for urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions following new data showing a record increase in atmospheric methane levels for a second consecutive year.
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Black Agenda Radio April 8, 2022 
- America is in a developing crisis. The quality of life for most people is going from bad to worse. And the present system offers no hope for the better.
- There is no end to wars—one after another since the end of World War If. After Korea came Vietnam; now the Middle East is like a powder keg.
- Huge stockpiles of atomic weapons are a constant reminder of the threat of nuclear war.
- Pollution is destroying our environment—from the water we drink to the air we breathe.
Labor:
Union Filings Have Increased 57 Percent in the Last Six Months, Labor Board Says The labor board says that the increase in filings is evidence that the agency’s dwindling budget needs to be increased. According to new data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), union election filings have increased in recent months, offering concrete evidence that the labor movement is on the rise. Between October 2021 and March 2022, union filings increased by 57 percent, up to 1,714 from 748 over the same period last year. Unfair labor practice charges have also increased by 14 percent, the labor board reports, from 7,255 to 8,254.
Economy:
Climate Change and Wars As the ugly war in Ukraine drags on, with more lives lost and atrocities (apparently) committed, energy and food prices hit yet more highs. The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the UN publishes a monthly global price index. The FAO Food Price Index reached yet another record high of 159.3 points in March, up 12.6% from February. Oil and gas prices are also near all-time high levels. In Europe, gas prices hit a record €335 per megawatt hours, and at that level, it is now cheaper for some power stations to burn coal rather than gas even when the cost of carbon permits is taken into consideration. Europe wants to follow NATO’s bidding and cut back on Russian energy imports. The irony is that some countries, like Italy, say that will need to burn more coal, in order to burn less Russian gas. The International Energy Agency (IEA) posed the dilemma in relation to global warming and energy needs, given the Ukraine war and the sanctions against Russia. “The faster EU policy makers seek to move away from Russian gas supplies, the greater the potential implication, in terms of economic costs and near-term emissions,” the IEA said, in a report. Can the circle be squared: ie getting more energy supply to reduce prices, while still trying to reduce fossil fuel production to lower greenhouse gas emissions? “We are determined to limit [Vladimir] Putin’s capacity to finance his atrocious war,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, wrote on Twitter. And then went on to say: “The EU must get rid of its dependency on fossil fuels”. At first sight, these two aims might be compatible. Cutting back on fossil fuel energy from Russia will reduce energy use and lower carbon emissions, no? After all, clean energy, says Christian Lindner, finance minister of Germany, should be considered the “energy of freedom”. So the German government plans to cut its dependence on Russian energy imports by accelerating renewables and reaching 100% ‘clean power’ by 2035. But in the same breath German Chancellor Olaf Scholz accepted that, in the short term, it has little choice but to continue buying gas and oil from Russia!
FAO Food Price Index
World:
The War in Ukraine: Fact and Fiction The main peculiarity of the present war in Ukraine is that it has been completely overshadowed by an unprecedented war of information. This has served to generate a lot of heat, but very little light. In fact, its principal objective is not to inform, but to conceal the real situation. In this, one has to admit, it has been highly successful. Let us take the most recent developments. When the Russians announced that they were withdrawing some of their forces from the area around Kyiv, the joy of the imperialist scoundrels knew no bounds.
Health, Education. and Wealfare:
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!
Vaccinations for Medicaid Patients Are Far Behind Those for Privately Insured . . .Most Medicaid enrollees are people of color, and the pandemic hit some of those communities hardest. It has also taken a particular toll on people with disabilities, who are eligible for Medicaid. But along with common reasons for vaccine hesitancy — such as lack of trust in government or the health care system — Medicaid patients may also have more difficulty taking time away from low-paying jobs to get a shot, experts say. “It’s very important that we are making sure that vaccines are available to all populations of people,” said Dr. Michelle Fiscus, a public health consultant with NASHP who helped author the report, “especially those who have already experienced disproportionate burdens from COVID-19.”
The Dumbfication of the United States! : After Over 4 Decades of Failure, Time to Ban This High-Stakes Standardized Testing Regime If these standardized tests were going to work as all their backers claimed, they would have done so by now. . . Huge corporations make the tests, grade the tests and then sell remediation materials when students fail. It’s a huge scam. . . . Huge corporations make the tests, grade the tests and then sell remediation materials when students fail (They make texts, That provide the answers for the standardized test!— R.S.) It’s a huge scam. But that’s not the only business created by this policy. Test and punish opened entirely new markets that hadn’t existed before. The emphasis on test scores and the “failing schools” narrative stoked unwarranted distrust in the public school system and a demand for more privatized alternatives. (Related: Testing Corporations Rake in Cash while Teachers Sell Plasma to Survive)