Daily News Digest June 16, 2022
Humanity Will Not be Covid Free, Until the Vaccines, Like the Salk Polio Vaccine, are Free For the Whole World!
The Covid Pandemic is Not Over! Yesterday, There Were Over 96,374 and Two Days Ago, There Were Over 119,909 New Covid CaseS!
Images of the Day:
Dick Gregory on the Untied States
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:
Question: Will women get arrested for having an abortion if the Supreme Court deems it illegal? Answer: An abortion-seeker’s criminal liability will depend on the abortion policies that her state put into place if the Supreme Court overturns Roe. Leaders of the anti-abortion movement have said in the past that women shouldn’t be prosecuted for obtaining abortion, and that criminal laws prohibiting it should be aimed at abortion providers or others who facilitate the procedure. Several states with abortion prohibitions that could go into effect with a Roe reversal have language exempting from prosecution the woman who obtained the abortion, but an abortion ban in Wyoming appears to muddle this question with its reference to the “pregnant woman” in the relevant code. There’s also nothing to stop lawmakers from passing the laws calling for the prosecution of the people who sought the abortion. A state legislator in Louisiana recently proposed a bill that would charge women with murder for obtaining abortion, though that bill failed to advance. Critics of the anti-abortion movement also note that, even with Roe on the books, women have been prosecuted for pregnancies that ended in miscarriage or stillbirth. — Abortion law Q&A: How a Supreme Court opinion in a blockbuster case could impact abortion rights
Videos of the Day:
Chris Hedges: The Long Road Home In the conclusion of The Long Road Home, Chris Hedges looks at the numerous hurdles faced by prisoners released into society, the toll of reentry on their families, the importance of educational programs in restoring self-esteem and setting goals, and the difficult process of parole. Hedges begins by speaking with Russ Owen, who spent 32 years in prison, on the day of his release from East Jersey State Prison. Owen, who graduated summa cum laude from Rutgers University and earned a doctorate in Pastoral Care in prison, began work recently as a community organizer with New Jersey Together. He says that although he is free, he struggles to cope with the deep loneliness that defined his life in prison.
Joy Behar Says “Once Black People Get Guns” U.S. Laws Will Change | Judge Joe Brown
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!
Environment —Ecosocialism or Ecocied!:
Nations are Pledging to Create Ocean Preserves: How Do Those Promises Add Up? Billions of people around the world rely on the ocean for food, income and cultural identity. But climate change, overfishingand habitat destruction are unraveling ocean ecosystems. As a marine ecologist, I study ways to improve ocean conservation and management by protecting key areas of the ocean. Many nations have created or promised to create marine protected areas – zones that may restrict activities like fishing, shipping and aquaculture. But decades of research have shown that not all marine protected areas are created equal, and that the most effective preserves restrict damaging activities.
‘The New Normal’: 100 Million+ People Across US Face Extreme Heat “Confidence/certainty is increasing for a brutal heatwave into next week,” one meteorologist said. “Category 5 heatwave.” “Confidence/certainty is increasing for a brutal heatwave into next week,” one meteorologist said. “Category 5 heatwave.” The climate crisis continues to bite in the U.S. this week with nearly one-third of people in the country living under heat advisories and warnings on Tuesday as high temperatures were reported from the Gulf Coast to the Upper Midwest and across the Southeast.
Record Flooding aand Mudslides Force Closure of Yellowstone National Park The entire park, spanning parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, will remain closed to visitors as officials assess damage to roads and bridges
As U.S. LNG Expands in Europe, a Hidden Threat Grows Researchers and industry experts are sounding the alarm about the dangers that naturally occurring radiation in liquified natural gas could pose to workers and communities in the U.S. and Europe. In March, President Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a joint task force with the goal of getting Europe off Russian gas and onto more of America’s fracked gas. Most Russian gas reaches Europe via pipeline, so getting U.S. gas to Europe will involve liquifying it and then shipping it across the Atlantic. And as shipments of liquified natural gas (LNG) from the United States increase, so too do the threats from an unwelcome intruder inherently part of America’s natural gas mix — radioactivity. That’s because government figures indicate that much of the gas that will be shipped to Europe may come from the Marcellus and Utica, black shale formations in Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. About 40 percent of natural gas produced in the United States comes from these formations, and, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, they have particularly high radioactivity levels.
Q&A: The Causal Relationship Between Inequality and Climate Change DeSmog interviewed an author of a new paper that says that policies focused only on greenhouse gas emissions will be less successful than a broader approach that tackles inequality and climate change together. Climate change has worsened global inequality, with poorer countries less able to withstand and adapt to climate change’s effects. It also has worsened inequality within countries between the rich and the poor: The impacts of drought, floods, hurricanes, and extreme heat are disproportionately felt by low-income communities and communities of color. But new research suggests the reverse is also true: Not only is climate change contributing to greater inequality, but inequality is also fueling climate change. A new peer-reviewed paper by Fergus Green and Noel Healy, published in One Earth, analyzes the various ways in which inequality contributes to more greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously making climate action even more difficult to pursue. The paper also asserts that climate policies that only focus on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, while ignoring inequality, will prove less effective at addressing the climate crisis compared to a much broader movement — like the Green New Deal — that attacks both inequality and climate change at the same time.
(The concept of a ‘Green New Deal’ greenwashes the fact that there is a climate emergency right now! — that ‘The Green New Deal’ trys to reform an unreformable Capitalism, when an green industiral yevolution is needed — An Ecosocialst Revolution! — Roland Sheppard)
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Focus on School Shootings is Diverting Attention From Everyday Violence in Schools “Hardening” schools isn’t working — and it’s pushing more and more students of color into the criminal justice system. Last week’s heartbreaking tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, has reignited the debate about how to stop school shootings. While common sense gun policy is sorely needed, the debate is unfortunately diverting attention from what violence actually looks like in most public schools on a daily basis — and from the schools that are making real progress on stopping this violence. It’s clear that conservative arguments to “harden” schools with more funding for security, police officers, and arming teachers are absurd and shouldn’t even be entertained. Research shows that, despite school police reducing some forms of violence — like fights — they don’t prevent school shootings or gun-related incidents. What they do is increase the number of student suspensions, expulsions, police referrals, and arrests, particularly for Black students — known as the “school-to-prison” pipeline. And school police are costly. As of 2015, the school policing industry (for products like metal detectors and facial recognition cameras) was a $2.7 billion market. That’s a lot of public money not going into classrooms.
The First Amendment Could Provide a Fresh Legal Approach to Defending Abortion Roe v. Wade was decided per a right to privacy based on the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, but there is another, perhaps at least equally compelling, way to look at the abortion issue — and that is through the lens of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. The establishment clause first asserts freedom from state religion or theocracy. This is a consequence of our Enlightenment heritage opposition to feudal state-imposed religion. The establishment clause only secondarily asserts freedom of religion, setting it within the demarcations of constitutional rejection or denial of state religion. But the abortion question is also an Enlightenment question of self-determination versus determination of self by other. In this case, that “other,” the prohibitor of abortion, would be a religious form of the state; the state having been captured, unconstitutionally, by a theocracy. Legal limitation, suppression or criminalization of abortion on religious grounds would smuggle in a theocratic state, one which adheres to one doctrine and excludes all others.
Labor:
There Are Better Ways to Fight Inflation Than Attacking Working People With Higher Interest Rates Tackling inflation requires reining in private markets—and embracing economic democracy. A deafening silence defines ”debates” among U.S. leaders about stopping or slowing today’s inflation. Alternatives to the Federal Reserve’s raising of interest rates and curtailing money supply growth are ignored. It’s as if there were no other ways to rein in price increases except to add more interest costs to the already excess debts of workers and small and medium businesses. Were the last two and a half years of the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, plus the economic crash of 2020, not sufficient enough burdens on Americans without piling on the additional burden of inflation that has been imposed by U.S. capitalism?
Economy:
Policy Errors of the 1970s Echo in Our Times Unexpectedly high inflation, wars in key commodity-producing regions, falling real wages, slowing economic growth, fears of monetary policy tightening and stock market turbulence – we see all of these things in the current global economy. These were also the dominant features of the global economy in the 1970s. That period ended in the early 1980s with a brutal monetary tightening in the US, a sharp fall in inflation and a wave of debt crises in developing countries, especially in Latin America. It was also followed by massive changes in economic policy: the conventional Keynesian economy was buried, labor markets were liberalized, state-owned enterprises were privatized and economies opened up to trade. How close are the parallels, especially with the 1970s? What are the differences? And what can we learn from those mistakes? The World Bank Global Economic Outlook report, published last week, addresses these questions. The parallels are clear, as are the differences. Last but not least, there are mistakes to be avoided: don’t be too optimistic; don’t take high inflation lightly; and do not leave vulnerable people and economies unprotected from the shocks themselves and their painful legacies. Does what we already see amount to stagflation – defined as a prolonged period of higher-than-expected inflation and lower-than-expected growth? The answer is “not yet”, but it is a risk. 
The Fed Fingers Its Worry Beads: Mortgage Rates Double in Six Months to 6.28 Percent; Crypto Crashes; Layoffs Explode in FinTech Wall Street does not have exclusivity on the pain trade. There’s pain at the pump for average Americans, pain at the grocery store, and now, adding to the pain for American home buyers who have watched the cost of homes spiral upward over the past year, the national average on the 30-year fixed rate mortgage just spiked to 6.28 percent as of yesterday.
World:
Immigrants are Only 3.5% of People Worldwide and Their Negative Impact is Often Exaggerated, in the U.S. and Globally I direct the Immigration Lab where we conduct research around migration – in all its aspects. For example, emigration – people leaving their countries of origin; or internal migration – people moving within a country. There are millions of people living in a different province or state than where they were born, such as in China or the U.S. We also study international migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, people that cross borders looking for economic opportunities or trying to reunite with family. We have studied refugees from Central America in Washington D.C., as well as from Afghanistan. We have also compared immigrants from Latin America in New York and those from North Africa in European cities. I’ve been studying migration since 2003, so almost 20 years.
Canadian Imperialism Kills Burkina Faso Miners in Mining Accident On April 16, a flash flood in Burkina Faso trapped eight miners underground. Six of them were killed, with two of the bodies only being found over a month later, on May 27. Six of the eight miners were from Burkina Faso, one from Zambia, and another from Tanzania. The company responsible is Canadian-based Trevali Mining Corp., which has mines in Burkina Faso, Namibia, as well as New Brunswick. The company is currently valued at 369 million dollars, making it the largest mining company in Burkina Faso.
The Great British Privatization Heist, Some Notes The UK is going through an energy crisis, with rising prices forcing people to use candles for lighting and unable to turn on their electric cookers when preparing meals. There are calls for a windfall tax on soaring energy company profits, which the Tory government has refused to implement. Predictably, the CEO of National Grid warned that such a tax would “harm reinvestment”.
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!
Mexican Official Says Flawed WTO Proposal on Vaccine Patents ‘Worse Than None at All’ The text proposed by rich nations, argues Hugo López-Gatell, “is nothing more than a PR stunt intended to kill off the possibility of a genuine intellectual property waiver.” As a major World Trade Organization meeting continued on Tuesday, a top Mexican official called out rich governments for obstructing a pathway to waive patent protections for Covid-19 vaccines and treatments “in order to put the profits of Big Pharma over people’s lives.