Daily News Digest July 18, 2022
Image 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%!
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both— Louis D. Brandeis
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:
Videos of the Day:
United StatesThe 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!
Chris Hedges: War with Iran The United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel, responsible for military fiascos, hundreds of thousands of deaths and innumerable war crimes in the Middle East, are now plotting to attack Iran. The United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia are plotting a war with Iran. The 2015 Iranian nuclear arms accord, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Donald Trump sabotaged, does not look like it will be revived. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is reviewing options to attack if Teheran looks poised to obtain a nuclear weapon and Israel, which opposes U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations, carries out military strikes.
The US Is Descending Into a Crisis of Overt Fascism. There’s Still a Way Out. The right is seeking to steal elections and deputizing vigilantes to constrain our rights. U.S. democracy is in peril. The specter haunting the United States consists not only of an impending fascism, but also of the inability of conscience, morality and justice to catch up with reality. The United States has increasingly come closer to tipping into the abyss of a new fascist politics. The latest indications of this include how the GOP is seeking to deputize vigilantes to prevent abortion seekers from even leaving their own states to seek abortions in other states, the ongoing evidence showing that Republicans are actively setting the stage to steal the 2024 election if they lose, new revelations about right-wing brainwashing in K-12 education, the enactment of voter suppression laws, the banning of books, the normalizing of “white replacement theory,” attacks on LGBTQ youth, and threats against librarians for refusing to remove censored books from their library shelves.
Democrates are not Democratic!: The Democrats’ Third-Party Massacres “The hardest thing I’ve ever seen the Democrats fight for is to keep a disabled Marine combat veteran off the ballot.” – Matthew Hoh, Green Party candidate for U.S. Senator in North Carolina. The last week of June 2022 brought more strikes against an American democracy already in deep crisis. Democrats blocked access to the ballot for the Green Party of North Carolina and seven independent gubernatorial tickets in New York. Meanwhile, the Republican-majority U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the Moore v. Harper case on North Carolina gerrymandering in which the court is likely in 2023 to affirm the “independent state legislature” doctrine. That formerly fringe legal theory claims that the U.S. Constitution’s election clause empowers state legislatures to administer federal elections as they see fit, no matter what state governors, state constitutions, or state courts say. It would enable state legislatures to rig elections through partisan gerrymandering, partisan voter suppression, and partisan vote counting. Republican-controlled state legislatures could name their own Electoral College slates if they lose their states’ popular vote in order to steal the 2024 presidential election.
Sanders Unveils Resolution to End US Support for ‘Catastrophic’ Saudi-Led War in Yemen As U.S. President Joe Biden visits the Middle East this week, three senators introduced a joint resolution to end the United States’ involvement in the Saudi-led war on Yemen. “This war has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis today and it is past time to end U.S. complicity in those horrors.”
The Worst is Yet to Come: When the Center Does Not Hold No lines of poetry are more resonant with our time than the celebrated lines of William Butler Yeats’ famous poem ‘The Second Coming’: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” This is especially true here in the United States, as it was in post-World War I Germany’s nurturing the rise of Naziism and its demonic voice, Adolph Hitler, the consummate outsider who managed to crawl up the mountain to ascend its peak. The core disabling affliction of the United States in the 21st Century is an energized and armed extreme right-wing and a listless, passive center, a development lamented by liberals who would sell their souls long before parting with their stocks and bonds, all for a non-voting seat at various illiberal tables of power. This lack of humane passion at the political center serves as a reinforcing complement to the violent forces of alienation waiting around the country for their marching orders, as the January 6th insurrectionary foray foretells. Together these contrasting modes of ‘citizenship’ signal the death of constitutional democracy as it has functioned, with ups and downs, flawed by slavery, genocide, and patriarchy at birth, indeed ever since the republic was established in 1787 as ‘a more perfect union.’ In 2022 a fascist alternative is assuming institutional, ideological, and populist prominence with active support of many American oligarchs who fund by night what they disavow when the sun shines (again recalling the behavior of German industrialists who thought of Hitler as their vehicle, whereas it turned out the other war around).
Noam Chomsky: Biden’s Middle East Trip Contains Echoes of Trump’s Policies Biden’s Middle East tour includes a meeting with alestinian leaders. Chomsky notes, “Palestinian hopes lie elsewhere.” After 18 months in office, President Joe Biden decided to pay a visit to the Middle East region. Oil is most likely what is dragging him back to the Middle East, and why for months now he had been warming up to Saudi Arabia, despite having said as a presidential candidate that he would make the Saudis “pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are,” while saying that there was “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.” As Noam Chomsky notes in this exclusive interview for Truthout, Biden is carrying on a U.S. tradition: Relations with Saudi Arabia “have always proceeded amicably, undisturbed by its horrifying record of human rights abuses, which persists.” Security also likely figures in the equation of Biden’s trip, particularly with regard to Israel. He will also visit the West Bank and meet with Palestinan leaders, but it’s hard to say what he hopes to accomplish there.
Environment: Ecocide or Ecosocialism
Climate Catastrophe Vs. Super Profits: The Real Worries of the Ruling Class The devastating effects of global warming are being felt by billions of people all around the world. Meanwhile, capitalist fat cats are openly downplaying the risk of entire cities being buried beneath the rising oceans as a trifling inconvenience. Like Emperor Nero before them, the rulers of this destructive system are fiddling – this time – as Rome drowns. While countless people are at risk of flooding from rising sea levels in the near future, billions are already feeling the effects of drought. Due to rising temperatures and extreme heat, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) estimates that more than 2.3 billion people are right now facing water stress.
Biden ‘Fiddles’As the Earth‘ Flares’!: As Alarm Over Plastic Grows, Saudis Ramp Up Production in the US President Biden is in the kingdom this week to strengthen ties, consistent with ‘American values.’ Meanwhile, a US-Saudi joint venture on the Texas coast is pumping out toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases. The flares started last December, an event Errol Summerlin, a former legal-aid lawyer, and his neighbors had been bracing for since 2017. After the flames, nipping at the night sky like lashes from a heavenly monster, came the odor, a gnarled concoction of steamed laundry and burned tires. Thus did the Saudi royal family mark the expansion of its far-flung petrochemical empire to San Patricio County, Texas, a once-rural stretch of flatlands across Nueces Bay from Corpus Christi. It arrived in the form of Gulf Coast Growth Ventures (GCGV), a plant that sprawls over 16 acres between the towns of Portland and Gregory. The complex contains a circuit board of pipes and steel tanks that cough out steam, flames and toxic substances as it creates the building blocks for plastic from natural gas liquids.
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Roaming Charges: The Screams of the Children Have Been Edited Out “The screams of children have been edited out…”– Editorial note appended to videos of the police response to the Uvalde shooting. A truck speeds past the parking lot of Robb Elementary School, turns abruptly and crashes into the ditch amid a cloud of dust. Two men turn towards the wreck and then retreat as the driver starts firing at them with an AR-15 rifle. The crash is seen by a teacher who calls 9-11. She tells the operator: “I can’t see him. The kids are running. The kids are running. Oh my god.” After firing several blasts of shots toward the school, the Uvalde shooter enters the building. It’s now 11:33 in the morning. By this time, several more 9/11 calls have alerted the police to a shooting incident at the school. A school security camera records the shooter as he saunters down the hallway, pauses briefly to peer around a corner, runs a hand through his hair, then continues down the hall toward classrooms 111 and 112.
Malik Miah: United States: What Two Cities Tell Us About Policing, Mass Shootings and Institutional Racism Two shootings in the United States tell us a lot about policing and institutionalised racism. In the first incident, police shot and killed an unarmed Black man in Akron, a working-class city in Ohio. The second incident — the 309th mass shooting this year — took place at a July 4 Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois, a predominantly white upper-income community north of Chicago. What many people don’t know is how differently each shooting was reported in the media and responded to by politicians, and why, or how quickly the police cracked down on Black protesters in Akron, while treating the Highland Park community with respect.
Highland Park, Buffalo, and Fascism Denial in U.S. Media Culture To deepen our sense of just how far the dominant United States media and political culture is prepared to go to deny and bury the fascitization process that is well underway in the world’s most powerful state, we have examined media coverage of two recent horrific mass shootings conducted by young white male fascists: Peyton Gedron’s murder of ten Black people in Buffalo, New York on May 14th and Robert Crimo’s murder of seven people, five of whom were Jewish, in the Chicago area suburb Highland Park on the 4th of July. It’s not a pretty story.
Labor:
Economy:
Shadow Government Statistics In f l a t i o n – Flash (July 14): The original Finished Goods – Producer Price Index Series, which goes back to 1948, hit its second highest annual inflation level in history, at 18.6% in June 2022, the strongest showing since the historical record-high 19.6% of November 1974, while the current Final-Demand Goods PPI-FD series (created in 2009) hit another all-time (13-year) high of 17.4% in June 2022, up from the prior 16.6% series record in May 2022. • Combining both the current series Final-Demand Goods Sector inflation, and the methodologically impaired Final-Demand Services Sector inflation, which declines with rising gasoline prices, the aggregate Final-Demand Producer Price Index (PPI-FD) June 2022 year-to-year headline inflation rate of 11.3% notched higher against some upwardly revised recent history, but remained shy of the March 2022 record high for this limited-history PPI series (created in 2009) of 11.6%, despite respective, seasonally adjusted monthly gains in April, May and June of 0.4%, 0.9% and 1.1%.
FRED Producer Price Index by Commodity: All Commodities 
The Fed’s Inspector General Clears Jerome Powell of Wrongdoing in the Trading Scandal, One Day After Five Senators Accuse Him of Hampering the Investigation Yesterday afternoon, Mark Bialek, the Inspector General of the Federal Reserve, released a memorandum clearing Fed Chair Jerome Powell and former Fed Vice Chair Richard Clarida of wrongdoing in the trading scandal that has engulfed multiple officials of the Federal Reserve. Curiously, that memorandum came just one day after Senator Sherrod Brown, Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, and four other Democratic colleagues in the Senate, sent Powell a letter about the trading scandal. The letter suggested that Powell was hampering the investigation and took him to task for failing to put the force of law and a chain of command in place for the Fed’s newly upgraded trading restrictions. Even more curious, the memorandum from the Fed’s Inspector General came just hours after Wall Street On Parade reported on Senator Brown’s letter and called attention to the fact that the trading scandal news broke more than 10 months ago and the public had been denied any findings from an investigation. We also called on the Inspector General to stop stalling and refer the matter to the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
World:
Stalinism has been an Obstacle to Wirld Revolution for Nearly 100 Years!: Britain: An Open Letter to the YCL – What Did Lenin Really Stand For? The crisis of capitalism is radicalising countless young people, who are hungry for revolutionary ideas and organisation. More and more young people are identifying themselves as communists. The youth wing of the Communist Party of Britain, the Young Communist League (YCL) has grown on this basis. The British Marxists of Socialist Appeal issued a friendly but sharp open letter to the comrades of the YCL, showing how the opportunism of their leaders, and their emphasis on stunts over theory, stand in sharp contrast to the real ideas of Lenin. The response from the YCL’s official channels entirely proved the comrades’ point. Within 15 minutes of the letter being published (less time than it would take to read), the YCL published a childish non-reply, whilst blocking Socialist Appeal comrades. This was followed by a stream of silly insults and memes from some of their official accounts and leading activists – anything other than reply to the political points of the open letter. This reaction speaks precisely to a lack of confidence in one’s own politics. Stalinist organisations invariably have a disdain for theory, because their own ideas are a complete revision of the authentic theories and methods of Marxism and Leninism. Therefore, rather than defending themselves, they respond to criticism with evasion and calumny.
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!
Monkeypox and Bio-Engineered Plagues Let’s hope that creepy disease called monkeypox isn’t the next plague waiting in the wings. With a world public weary of covid, it easily could be lulled into nonchalance by the deceptive tale that, oh, monkeypox only happens to gay men. Well it doesn’t. It can infect anybody. And if you think you’re safe because you’re not a gay male, you may be in for a nasty surprise. Predictably the U.S. health bureaucracy is slow out of the gate. Of the two monkeypox vaccines, the better one is in short supply. That’s the two-dose Jynneos vaccine, which the department of Health and Human Services is releasing, but so far less than a million shots. Meanwhile, states can request doses of an older smallpox vaccine, ACAM2000, from the national stockpile, which contains roughly 100 million doses. This vaccine features some lousy side effects, and those with heart disease or the immunocompromised should avoid it.