Daily News Digest April 26, 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:
I Did’t Expose 
Everyone Talks About Peace
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:
The Chris Hedges Report: Ukraine and the ‘Worthy’ And ‘Unworthy’ Victims of War Journalist Peter Oborne joins Chris Hedges to discuss how this bifurcation of the world into ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims obliterates nuance and ambiguity, and is a key component of propaganda, especially in war
Quotes of the Day:
. . . Soldiers, don’t give you a sales to brutes. Men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel. Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourself to these unnatural men, machine men with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate. Only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers, don’t fight for slavery. Fight for liberty. In the 17th chapter of St. Luke it is written, “The kingdom of God is within man, not one man, nor a group of men, but in all man in you. You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You, the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power, let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age of security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie. They do not fulfill that promise. They never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people. Now want to just fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all —Charlie Chaplin: Greatest Speech Ever Charlie Chaplin The Great Dictator
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!
Uncle Sam Crgradualtes its Junior Partner in Crine: Latuff: Good Boy
The Corporations, Chevron, and their Court Systen Put Steven Donziger’s in Jail Without aTrial: “Corporations must not be allowed to continue abusing the U.S. justice system to silence and intimidate human rights defenders.”: This Attorney Took On Chevron. Then Chevron-Lnked Judges and Private Prosecutors Had Him Locked Up! Steven Donziger’s legal saga has demonstrated deep-rooted conflicts of interest in the judicial system when it comes to climate justice
Steven Donziger Walks Free After 993 Days of ‘Completely Unjust’ Detention “He should have never been detained for even one day,” said an Amnesty International official, “as it has been clear the whole process against him has been in retaliation for his human rights work that exposed corporate wrongdoings.” Human rights lawyer Steven Donziger walked free Monday after 993 days of detention stemming from his decades-long legal fight with Chevron, which deployed its vast resources in a campaign to destroy Donziger after he won a $9.5 billion settlement against the fossil fuel giant over its pollution of the Amazon rainforest. “Corporations must not be allowed to continue abusing the U.S. justice system to silence and intimidate human rights defenders.”
Environment —Ecosocialism or Ecocide!:
It’s evident we are not going to drill our way out of high gas prices, nor are we going to put the brakes on climate change by burning more fossil fuels. The Democrats know this, of course, they are simply betting that voters don’t care enough to push back, using high gas prices as cover and the war in Ukraine as an excuse to keep the oil flowing. This leads to a far more important and pressing issue. The US, with Biden at the helm, is not anywhere near meeting the modest goals laid out in the Paris Agreement, which has set a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 50% below 2005 levels by the year 2030. Will we ever reach this reduction? Not likely, and especially not given the administration’s insistence that more oil should be drained from our already imperiled public lands, which only exacerbates the unfathomable trouble we are in. — Drill, Biden, Drill: The Anatomy of a Climate Hustler
Rallies Held Across US for ‘Climate, Care, Jobs, and Justice’ “The president and Congress must protect our planet and the people who call Earth home—now.” “We simply cannot afford inaction: It’s time to make a real investment in making our nation safer, cleaner, healthier, and also more equitable and resilient.” At “Fight for Our Future” rallies held in Washington, D.C., Phoenix, Atlanta, and more than 40 additional cities across the country, the message was simple: Time is running out for Congress and President Joe Biden to make the bold investments needed to create millions of unionized clean energy and care sector jobs that can simultaneously mitigate greenhouse gas pollution along with economic and racial injustice.
Durban’s latest Rain Bomb kills more than 300 and unveils state climate sloth This devastating report on the terrible floods in Durban indicts the total failure of the South African government to prepare for an entirely predictable and predicted disaster. But this report has huge international relevance because these floods are precisely one of the forms climate change is taking in many parts of the world and the criminal negligence of the Ramaphosa government is typical of capitalist governments everywhere. Floods again ravaged South Africa’s third-largest city, Durban, killing at least 300 residents on Monday, forcing thousands more to evacuate their homes, and preventing movement of people and emergency goods due to collapsed roads and bridges. In vast areas of the city, broken water reticulation pipes and the electricity system’s collapse have left taps dry and power out for days. (Pictures are here.)
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Alice Walker and the Price of Conscience Alice Walker was disinvited to the Bay Area Book Festival after Zionist groups threatened to carry out protests. The public and presenters are complicit in her blacklisting if they attend. There is a steep price to pay for having a conscience and more importantly the courage to act on it. The hounds of hell pin you to the cross, hammering nails into your hands and feet as they grin like the Cheshire cat and mouth bromides about respect for human rights, freedom of expression and diversity. I have watched this happen for some time to Alice Walker, one of the most gifted and courageous writers in America. Walker, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel The Color Purple, has felt the bitter sting of racism. She refuses to be silent about the plight of the oppressed, including the Palestinians.
Supreme Court Hears Key Liberties Cases The U.S. Supreme Court is making a U-turn on civil rights. Its conservative supermajority of six justices is poised to send constitutional freedoms back a half-century. The 2021–22 docket is full of cases cherry-picked to accelerate this rollback. Polls show that trust in the high tribunal is at its lowest ebb. Many now see it for what it has always been: a political body created to defend the powers-that-be. The court is biased and bought. It operates with little constraint and is rife with out-front politicking and conflict-of-interest practices. Unlike all other judiciaries, it has no code of ethics. Two justices — Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas — were confirmed despite evidence of sexual misconduct. Trump’s three extremists — Neil Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — are leading a Christian right charge through the Constitution and previous legal stances. Their attitudes are uniformly pro-big business, white supremacist, and for traditional family values and religious exceptionalism.
Labor:
Child Labor is Back!: Almost 20% of Children are In Paid Work in Brazil “For Bolsonaro, it is good that children work.” A joint study by Brazilian academic Guilherme Lichand, who works at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and his colleague Sharon Wolf, from the University of Pennsylvania, USA, measured the underreporting of child labour in Brazil and concluded that the actual number of children aged 7-14 working in the country is seven times higher than official statistics show. The most recent official data from the World Development Indicators (WDI), a database of international statistics compiled by the World Bank, showed that in 2015, 2.5 per cent of Brazilian children in this age group were working, equivalent to 738,600 people. But the study by Lichand and Wolf concluded that the real percentage was 19.15 per cent, or approximately 5,650,000 children, according to research reported in the Folha de São Paulo newspaper.
Economy:
Shadow Government Saatustics Gross Domestic PRODUCT – The third estimate of Fourth-Quarter 2021 Gross Domestic Product (GDP), revised minimally in aggregate, but reconfirmed, once again, significant issues with the purported “Economic Recovery” from the Pandemic-Driven Economic Collapse; while initial estimates of Gross Domestic Income (GDI) and Gross National Product (GNP) for the quarter were mixed (BEA). Against downwardly revised headline annualized real Fourth-Quarter 2021 GDP growth of 6.89% [previously 6.99%], and unrevised 3q2021 growth of 2.30%, Final Sales (GDP net of Inventory Change) respectively gained 1.67% [previously 2.02%] in 4q2021 and 1.30% in 3q2021. The problem remains that a massive, involuntary inventory buildup has continued in play, due to a significant faltering of 4q2021 consumer demand (see the later RETAIL SALES Section). Specifically consider that of the headline 6.89% annualized real 4q2021 GDP growth, 5.22% of that, fully three-fourths of the gain was due to a buildup in unsold inventories, and the Atlanta Fed GDP Now Model currently is indicating 0.9% [Apr 5] annualized real growth for 2q2022 GDP (update due April 8th), as those inventories presumably are worked off. As otherwise discussed in the later FOMC Section, with broad weakness continuing in the headline GDP and the non-recovered March 2022 Payroll Employment, the FOMC’s recent movement to hike interest rates, likely will not contain surging inflation, but rather do increasing damage to an already moribund economy.
Fed Chair Powell Telegraphs the Perfect Storm for Wall Street’s Megabanks: Rapid Rate Hikes Hitting $234 Trillion in Derivatives The Federal Reserve (the Fed) is the central bank of the United States. It sets monetary policy, including control of the benchmark short-term interest rate known as the Federal Funds rate, or in Wall Street jargon, the “Fed Funds” rate. This is a key rate because it signals the rate at which overnight loans are made between financial institutions and the direction of interest rates in general
World:
The Central Bankers’ Dilemma “The inflation that we got was not at all the inflation that we were looking for,” US Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell said in his press conference after the Fed’s monetary policy committee decided to accelerate the ‘tapering’ of its bond purchases to zero by March 2022 and suggested that it will start to hike its policy interest rate (the ‘Fed funds’ rate) from zero soon after that. What did Powell mean by ‘not the inflation we were looking for’? He did not mean just the level of the inflation rate. Headline US consumer goods and services inflation is now much higher than the Fed forecast back in September at its last meeting. And so is what is called ‘core inflation’, which excludes fast-rising energy and food prices. Headline inflation reached 6.5% in November, the highest rate for nearly 40 years. But Jay Powell was also referring to the causes of that inflation rate. It seems that the Fed no longer considers the rise in inflation as ‘transitory’ but likely to hang around for some time, although its median forecast is for the personal consumption inflation (PCE) rate to finish at 5.3% for 2021 but then drop back to 2.6% in 2022 and eventually fall to 2.1% by 2024. In that sense, the Fed still reckons inflation is ‘transitory’ but it will be higher than previously thought, in the short term.
Alice Walker and the Price of Conscience Alice Walker was disinvited to the Bay Area Book Festival after Zionist groups threatened to carry out protests. The public and presenters are complicit in her blacklisting if they attend. There is a steep price to pay for having a conscience and more importantly the courage to act on it. The hounds of hell pin you to the cross, hammering nails into your hands and feet as they grin like the Cheshire cat and mouth bromides about respect for human rights, freedom of expression and diversity. I have watched this happen for some time to Alice Walker, one of the most gifted and courageous writers in America. Walker, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel The Color Purple, has felt the bitter sting of racism. She refuses to be silent about the plight of the oppressed, including the Palestinians.
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!
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