Daily News Digest April 29, 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:
Bendib: Attorney Corporal
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:
‘Liquid Gold, Mate!’: Activists’ Spoof on Big Pharma’s Vaccine Greed Nails It The satirical video’s release coincides with a new People’s Vaccine Alliance campaign targeting Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson during their annual general meeting
Quotes of the Day:
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!
Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming the New Norm Big Tech and the corporate media are ushering in an ominous era of intense censorship over Ukraine. Google has sent a warning shot across the world, ominously informing media outlets, bloggers, and content creators that it will no longer tolerate certain opinions when it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Global Suicide Budget There’s really only one question here, which is: How do we change? “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” I truly wish these words of Ike, uttered seven decades ago, were no longer quite so relevant. Perhaps what he should have called it was a “cross of irony.”
Climate Groups Sue to Stop DeJoy’s ‘Unacceptable’ Gas-Guzzling Postal Truck Plan The plaintiffs say the USPS proposal “will not only deliver pollution to every neighborhood in America, it’s also unlawful.” “Ninety percent of the new trucks would be combustion vehicles with a worse fuel economy than a gas-powered Ford F-150.”
Environment —Ecosocialism or Ecocide!:
Science Overruled: How Vested Interests Rewrote the IPCC’s Latest Report The Summary for Policymakers for the April 2022 Working Group III Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the third part of the IPCC’s 2021-2022 Sixth Assessment Report addressing Mitigation , is according to UN Secretary General António Guterres, “a litany of broken climate promises.… Simply put, they [the vested interests] are lying,” denying the science, present in the report as a whole but excluded or downplayed in the Summary for Policymakers.
Lake Mead Elevation Projections Water levels at Lake Mead are projected to drop earlier than expected this summer, based on forecasting from the Bureau of Reclamation. The March 2022 forecast estimates are as follows:
- The current water elevation for end of March is 1,063.11 feet.
- Projection for end of April 2022 is 1,057.14 feet.
- Projection for end of July 2022 is 1,046.87 feet.
Lake Mead is Lake Mead is the the largest reservoir in the United States and part of a system that supplies water to at least 40 million people across seven states and northern Mexico. It stands today at its lowest level since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. This means less water will be portioned out to some states in the 2022 water year. As of August 22, 2021, Lake Mead was filled to just 35 percent of its capacity. The low water level comes at a time when 95 percent of the land in nine Western states is affected by some level of drought (64 percent is extreme or worse). It continues a 22-year megadrought that may be the region’s worst dry spell in twelve centuries. — Lake Mead Drops to a Record Low
Parched Southern California Takes Unprecedented Step of Restricting Outdoor Watering The resolution will limit watering to just one day a week, affecting millions in Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties Southern California officials declared a water shortage emergency Tuesday, and adopted new unprecedented restrictions on outdoor watering that will affect millions of people living in Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties. Metropolitan water district of southern California’s resolution will limit outdoor watering to just one day per week for district residents supplied by a stressed system of canals, pipelines, reservoirs and hydroelectric power plants called the State Water Project, which supplies water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to 27 million Californians and 750,000 acres of farmland.
Big Oil Frackers/Water Users:
Thirsty Oil Companies Need More Water!: Representatives of the energy services company Halliburton told EWG in the fall of 2011 that 50-to-60 percent of new wells being drilled in Kern County were hydraulically fractured. And according to data in the 2009 annual report of the Division of Oil and Gas, the five most productive oil fields in Kern County had 1,527 new wells drilled that year. From these figures, EWG estimates that, at a minimum, more than 750 California wells were fracked in 2009 alone. This is clearly an underestimate, however, both because it counts only a subset of the wells in California – and about half as many wells were drilled in 2009 as in each of the previous two years. — California Regulators: See No Fracking, Speak No Fracking
Our rights are being Facked by Big Oil and Their Federal, State, and Local Governments!
From pages 133-135 of the book, Two Californias: the truth about the split-state movement by Michael DiLeo and Eleanor Smith:
Cheap Water + New Land = Big Money
Oil, Water Are Volatile Mix in West Energy Firms Buying River Rights Add to Competition for Scarce Resource By Stephanie Simon(2009): Oil companies have gained control over billions of gallons of water from Western rivers in preparation for future efforts to extract oil from shale deposits under the Rocky Mountains, according to a new report by an environmental group that opposes such projects. The group, Western Resource Advocates, used public records to conclude that energy companies are collectively entitled to divert more than 6.5 billion gallons of water a day during peak river flows. The companies also hold rights to store, in dozens of reservoirs, 1.7 million acre feet of water, enough to supply metro Denver for six years.
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Black Agenda Report April 27, 2022
Margaret Kimberley Obama Wants Censorship
Barack Obama and his ruling class bosses are losing legitimacy with more and more people. They have decided that censoring information will resolve their problems.
Dr. Jemima Pierre The OAS, Or the “Ministry of Colonies”
In the wake of the expulsion of the Organization of the American States from Nicaragua, we need to revisit one of its major crime scenes: Haiti. Editors, The Black Agenda Review SPEECH: “The architects of this murder are many:” Kwame Nkrumah on the killing of Patrice Lumumba, 1961Kwame Nkrumah’s 1961 speech on the assassination
Danny Haiphong It is not surprising that a settler colonial state
Race and The Great American Death Divide
would practice racism for centuries or that race would be the major factor determining who lives and who dies.
Raymond Nat Turner A lil’ homegoing homage to Brother Donald…Donald Smith always performed at Black Agenda Report events in New York City. He was a great musician and friend to the Black Agenda Report team. He will be missed.
Ann Garrison Notes from Wartorn Ethiopia, Part III: Crimes of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front BAR contributor Ann Garrison reports on conditions in Ethiopia.
Roberto Sirvent BAR Book Forum: Mercy Romero’s “Toward Camden” In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Mercy Romero . Romero is Associate Professor of American Literature and American Studies at Sonoma State University. Her book is Toward Camden . Roberto Sirvent BAR Book Forum: Treva B. Lindsey’s “America, Goddam” In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Treva B. Lindsey. Lindsey is Associate Professor in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at Ohio State University. Her book is America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice.
Jacqueline Luqman The Little-Known International Charter At The Center of Ukraine War and China’s Future Defense The U.S. talks about “rule based order” because international law is not on its side. The 1999 OSCE Charter explains why the Biden administration would rather make up a new phrase out of whole cloth than live up to agreements it signed.
John Parker Imperialism The word imperialism has been used and misused often as the crisis in Ukraine continues. An understanding of its meaning is important in any analysis.
Jeremy Miller The Nuclear Threat From Beyond the Ideological CompassThe expiration of nuclear treaties between the U.S. and Russia mean that conventional wars bring a risk of nuclear weapons use.
Owen Schalk Canada and the Overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah
April 27, 2022 is the 50th anniversary of Kwame Nkrumah’s death. He was ousted from the Ghanaian presidency by Canadian trained elements of his own military who were also supported by the CIA. Canada’s actions were in keeping with its role as a partner of US imperialism. New Frame Devastation in Durban The floods that have wreaked havoc in the shacklands of Durban, South Africa are another searing indictment of the social abandonment of the majority by a predatory political elite.
John Philpot Presentation of the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize by the International Women’s Network for Democracy and Peace to Mr. John Philpot Canadian attorney John Philpot received the Victoroire Ingabire Umuhoza Prize for Democracy and Peace on March 19, 2022. The prize is given in recognition of the Rwandan former political prisoner. These are his remarks. Dan Beeton The Venezuela Coup 20 Years Later
The legacy of Venezuela’s short-lived 2002 coup d’etat, and the subsequent countercoup, endures for US-Latin American relations.
Labor:
Amazon Labor Union and the Awakening of the American Working Class A wave of unionization in the United States is enthusing and inspiring workers all around the world. The first Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, is now represented by the independent Amazon Labor Union. Every week, dozens of Starbucks coffee shops are filling to join Starbucks Workers United. A first group of workers at an Apple Store signed their cards to join the Communication Workers of America. There have been 589 union applications to the National Labor Relations Board so far in 2022, double the number compared to the first four months of 2021
Economy:
Justice Department and SEC Portray Serially-Charged Banks on Wall Street as Hapless Victims of Archegos Fraud. Nobody’s Buying It. Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) brought charges against executives at Archegos Capital Management, the family office hedge fund that blew up in March of 2021. The Justice Department brought criminal charges while the SEC and CFTC brought civil charges. Archegos founder and owner Sung Kook (Bill) Hwang and its former CFO, Patrick Halligan, were indicted on securities fraud and racketeering charges. William Tomita, the former Head Trader, and Scott Becker, the former Chief Risk Officer, have pleaded guilty for their roles in the fraud and are cooperating with the Justice Department.
Global Megabanks Are Tanking – The Same Ones the Fed Bailed Out in 2019 As long-term readers of Wall Street On Parade know well, we have regularly warned that the failure of Congress to meaningfully reform Wall Street by restoring the Glass-Steagall Act poses a national security threat to our nation in times of crisis. Instead of meaningful reform, Congress has stood by and watched the Fed bail out the global banks repeatedly since 2008 – either with direct loans or by keeping interest rates artificially low (“administered rates”) or through trillions of dollars in asset purchases from the banks (what the Fed prefers to call Quantitative Easing). The Fed’s balance sheet has ballooned from less than $1 trillion before the financial crisis in 2008 to $9 trillion today as a result of its willingness to perpetually bail out Wall Street. American taxpayers are on the hook for 98 percent of the Fed’s balance sheet and thus have a critical interest in demanding both transparency and accountability from the Fed. In the fall of 2019 there was no war in Ukraine, there was no pandemic. But for still undisclosed reasons, the Fed decided to funnel trillions of dollars in cumulative repo loans to the trading units of U.S. megabanks and their foreign counterparties. The Fed’s repo loans stretched from September 17, 2019 through July 2, 2020. The Fed has begun releasing the names of the banks and the amounts they had borrowed on a quarterly basis, following a two-year lag. There has been an unprecedented mainstream media news blackout of this information.
World:
Reformism to Warmongering: A Slippery Slope On 9 April, a group called Stand With Ukraine held a small demonstration in London. Despite receiving support from a number of trade unions, only a few hundred people took part. In true Orwellian fashion, this so-called anti-war solidarity demonstration was filled with hair-raising, warmongering rhetoric. Slogans included: “arm, arm, arm Ukraine!”, and participants were reportedly inviting NATO to “call Putin’s bluff”, i.e. to launch a full-blown military intervention and spark World War III.
Now, Let Us Talk Peace With Russian shells raining down on Ukrainian cities, an uneasy ceasefire in Yemen, the attack on Palestinians at prayer in Jerusalem and many other conflicts around the world, it might seem to some to be inappropriate to talk about peace. When a war is going on, though, it is absolutely the time to talk about peace. How else can we prevent even further loss of life or yet more millions forced into refuge somewhere else in the world? It is welcome that at last the United Nations has taken an initiative with the welcome request by Secretary-General António Guterres for face-to-face meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. There must be an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine followed by a Russian troop withdrawal and agreement between Russia and Ukraine on future security arrangements.
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!
‘Unprecedented’: WHO Chief Urges Moderna Shareholders to Back Vaccine Tech Transfer The WHO director-general will present a shareholder resolution calling on the pharmaceutical giant to make its coronavirus vaccine recipe available to the world. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus will present a shareholder resolution Thursday calling on the U.S.-based pharmaceutical giant Moderna to make its coronavirus vaccine technology available to the world, a first-of-its-kind move from the U.N. agency as the global pandemic rages on.
Yesterday there were 57,738 New Covid Case in the United States: No, Fauci, a Pandemic Can’t End in One Country Only. You Taught Me That. Ialways believed that when it ended, or came as close to “ending” as science and petulant politics could manage, there would be a shared moment of great rejoicing joined in somber reflection of all that had been lost. There would have to be one, yeah? After almost a thousand days of COVID, a thousand days of choking death and stifled fear, of refrigerator trucks stuffed with bodies and nurses wearing garbage bags to save their own lives, even the folly of “leaders” and the vandalism of followers has not smothered our need to embrace an ending to this thing, a place where we who are still here can say, “Here we are.”