Daily News Digest April 20, 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:
Nina Simone – I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free (Montreux 1976)
Quotes of the Day:
In a recent book, Rupert Russell pointed out that the price of food has often been decisive historically. Currently the global food price index is at its highest ever recorded. The hits people living in the Middle East and North Africa, a region which imports more wheat than any other, with Egypt the world’s largest importer. The price of these imports is set by the international commodity exchanges in Chicago, Atlanta and London. Even with the government subsidies, people in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Algeria and Morocco spend between 35 and 55 per cent of their income on food. They’re living on the edge: small price rises bring poverty and hunger. Russell reminds us that grain was key to almost every stage of World War I. Fearing the threat to its grain exports, imperial Russia helped provoke that global conflict. As the conflict dragged on, Germany, also suffered from a dearth of cheap bread and looked to seize Russia’s bountiful harvest. “Peace, Land, and Bread” was the Bolshevik slogan, and success had much to do with bread and the control of the new grain pathways inside Russia. Now the Russian invasion of Ukraine puts the harvest of these two leading grain exporters in jeopardy. — The Inflation Debate
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!
Ukraine and Yemen Wars Highlight US’s Role as Biggest Arms Dealer in the World U.S. weapons manufacturers have spent $2.5 billion lobbying Congress over the past 20 years. Analysts say the defense industry has spent billions of dollars lobbying Congress while quietly making much more in profit by manufacturing weapons that fuel deadly conflicts in Ukraine, Yemen and across the world under federal arms sales agreements that have little effective congressional oversight. There is a dangerous “feedback loop” between major weapons manufacturers in the United States that make billions in profits from arms sales, the countries that arm themselves with these weapons, and the U.S. government, which uses arms sales as “tools” to gain economic and diplomatic leverage, according to Dan Auble, a researcher at money-in-politics tracker OpenSecrets.
Environment —Ecosocialism or Ecocide!:
More Fracked Gas Exports Will Worsen Climate Emergency. Send Heat Pumps Instead Expanding LNG exports will decrease U.S. energy security and increase climate-harming methane emissions. Rather than toss another lifeline to a dying industry, Biden should help accelerate the energy transition processes already underway in Europe.
Report Details How Community Utilities Can Usher In Green Energy Transition “It is time to reignite the radical history of community utilities to herald the transition to a genuinely democratic, equitable, and clean energy system.” “We have a powerful tool to accelerate the energy transition in a way that builds community wealth and energy justice in our communities: publicly and cooperatively owned utilities.”
Quebec Becomes World’s First Jurisdiction to Ban Oil and Gas Exploration In what campaigners are calling a world first, Quebec’s National Assembly voted Tuesday afternoon to ban new oil and gas exploration and shut down existing drill sites within three years, even as the promoters behind the failed Énergie Saguenay liquefied natural gas (LNG) project try to revive it as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “By becoming the first state to ban oil and gas development on its territory, Quebec is paving the way for other states around the world and encouraging them to do the same,” Montreal-based Équiterre said in a release. “However, it is important that the political will that made this law possible be translated into greenhouse gas reductions in the province, since Quebec and Canada have done too little to reduce their GHGs over the past 30 years.”
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
People of Color More Likely to be Harmed by Pesticides, Study Finds “These workers somehow are seen as expendable,” said Robert Bullard, a co-author of the report and the director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University. “This study shows the systemic neglect that [led to] a whole workforce being an underclass and not given the same weight when it comes to health and safety.” Hispanic and Latino farmworkers at high risk from pesticide use in agriculture, while people in Roughly 90% of pesticide use in the US is in agriculture, making farmworkers – 83% of whom identify as Hispanic – more vulnerable to the synthetic chemicals intended to kill, repel or control pests.
Labor:
Economy:
FRED Producer Price Index by Commodity: All Commodities
The Inflation Debate The inflation debate among mainstream economists rages on. Is the accelerating and high inflation rate of commodities here to stay for some time and or is ‘transitory’ and will soon subside? Do central banks need to act fast and firmly to ‘tighten’ monetary policy (ie cut back on injection credit into banks through purchases of government bonds (QE) and start hiking policy interest rates sharply? Or is such tightening an overkill and will cause a slump? I have covered these issues in several previous posts in some detail. But it is worth going over some of the arguments and the evidence again because high and rising inflation is severely damaging to the livelihoods and prosperity of most households in the advanced capitalist economies and even a matter of life and death for hundreds of millions in the so-called Global South of poor countries. Being made unemployed is devastating for those who lose their jobs and for their families. But unemployment affects usually only a minority of working people at any one time. Inflation, on the other hand, affects the majority, particularly those on low incomes where basic commodities like energy, food, transport and housing matter even more.
Just Six Wall Street Firms Borrowed $116.83 Billion from the Fed’s Money Market Bailout Fund – 72 Percent of the Total The Federal Reserve has set up a veritable obstacle course to prevent the public from drilling down to see that just six big Wall Street firms received the lion’s share of loans from its emergency funding facility called the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF). The MMLF made emergency loans from March 23, 2020 through April 23, 2020, but the program did not end on April 23, 2020. That’s because these were not overnight loans. They were loans made for periods up to as long as 11 months in some cases – taking the program into 2021. The MMLF made loans against paper that could not be sold elsewhere that was sitting in money market funds that were having difficulty raising cash to meet redemption requests. The loans were for the same maturity as the paper being put up as collateral.
Why Didn’t Vanguard, the Largest Mutual Fund Family in the U.S., Need to Borrow from the Fed while the Wall Street Titans Did? . . . There are two striking aspects to this story. First, no mainstream media outlet will go near the story. The same media outlets that battled the Fed in court for more than two years to name the Wall Street firms and how much they borrowed from the Fed after the 2008 financial crash are refusing to report on the second largest Fed bailout in U.S. history. That bailout includes not just loans made by the MMLF but by over a dozen other Fed bailout facilities created in 2019 and 2020. (See our earlier report: There’s a News Blackout on the Fed’s Naming of the Banks that Got Its Emergency Repo Loans; Some Journalists Appear to Be Under Gag Orders.) News blackouts involving major Wall Street news stories – the only industry in America running its own private justice system and a perpetual revolving door in Washington – should raise alarm bells among all Americans. We can see from Putin’s authoritarian rule in Russia what evolves from a silenced free press. The second striking aspect is that the largest mutual fund family in America, the Vanguard Group, didn’t need to borrow a dime from the Fed. According to a report by Andrea Travillian at Investopedia on January 29 of this year, the Vanguard Group had $6.151 trillion in Assets Under Management (AUM) at that time, making it the largest “retail asset manager in the world.”
World:
The Forces Pushing Asylum Seekers to Cross the English Channel are Poorly Understood The impulse driving tens of thousands of desperate people to cross the Channel in inflatable dinghies is the outcome of a dozen hot wars and military stalemates in the Middle East and North Africa. These conflicts, largely forgotten by the rest of the world, tear apart societies and wreck economies, leaving whole populations facing unending violence and poverty – and no choice but to flee. Mass flight from this great zone of conflict, which stretches from Mali to Afghanistan and Turkey to Somalia, will go on as long as the conflicts that first set the exodus in motion continue. These are the true generators of the immigration crisis that has engulfed Europe over the past 10 years or more, and has done so much to toxify its politics. Boris Johnson’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda is only the latest bid to gain political advantage from the anti-immigrant reaction.
France: “Republican Front”, Or Class Struggle? The second round of the French presidential elections will take place on 24 April. All the parties of the left and trade union leaders are pressuring their supporters to get behind a ‘Republican Front’ to beat Marine Le Pen who they believe is a fascist – by voting for Macron’s government of this rich. This rotten class collaboration is already being rejected by thousands of young people, who have occupied their universities and demonstrated with the slogan: neither Macron, nor Le Pen! On Wednesday 13 April, hundreds of students occupied Sorbonne University in Paris, along with the École Normale Supérieure in the capital, as well as at the Nancy campus of political sciences institute Sciences Po. In Sorbonne, a historic staging ground for the revolutionary movement in May ‘68, students maintained their occupation for 30 hours before being brutally evicted by police. As one student told Reuters: “We’re tired of always having to vote for the less bad of the two, and that’s what explains this revolt.” There is a widespread rejection of the whole establishment by the youth, who are moving to the left.
Latin America, the Caribbean and the War in Ukraine As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine moves through its second month, its unconcealable economic impact continues to grow at the global level. Price rises in energy, food and fertilizer have driven up inflation to levels that haven’t been seen in decades, leading to higher interest rates that will stall economic growth. The International Monetary Fund’s latest report predicts slower growth in every region of the world, and the United Nations warns of a “hurricane of hunger.”
The Armenian Genocide Holds a Bitter Lesson for Those Who Weep for Ukraine From 1915 through today, politicians have made lots of great-sounding speeches. But human suffering is never part of the equation. if there’s one thing we can say for sure about the governments of the U.S. and Europe, it’s that they sound upset about Russia’s brutalization of Ukraine. President Joe Biden recently called it “genocide.” A spokesperson for his National Security Council said that it’s working to “identify any Russians responsible for the atrocities and war crimes that have been committed.” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared that the civilian killings in the city of Bucha “are war crimes we will not accept … those who did this must be held accountable.” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson proclaimed, “We will not rest until justice is done.” However, history suggests that this is the emptiest of rhetoric. It’s difficult to find any examples of governments sacrificing their goals for the well-being of people in other countries. Instead, governments see the very real suffering of foreigners as useful for propaganda purposes — to motivate their own citizens and make their enemies look bad — but otherwise as totally irrelevant.
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!
Corruption in Drug Patents: Take Away the Money When patents can be worth enormous sums of money, companies will find ways to abuse the system. The New York Times had an editorial about the corruption of the patent system in recent decades. It noted that the patent office is clearly not following the legal standards for issuing a patent, including that the item being patented is a genuine innovation and that it works. Among other things, it pointed out that Theranos had been issued dozens of patents for a technique that clearly did not work. As the editorial notes, the worst patent abuses occur with prescription drugs. Drug companies routinely garner dozens of dubious patents for their leading sellers, making it extremely expensive for potential generic competitors to enter the market. The piece points out that the twelve drugs that get the most money from Medicare have an average of more than fifty patents each