Daily News Digest July 22, 2022
Images of the Day:
377 Good Guys With a Gun
The Only Effective Pandemic Response Is a Global One
Another Example Capitalism as a Failed System: World Capilalism Has Been Aware of the Comming Catastrophe of Global for Over 5 Decades 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!
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
Quotes of the Day:
And empirically, this is also true. The organizer of the workshop, Simon Mohun, published a paper a few years ago that showed only 1% of working people in the US got income from capital (profit, interest and rents) as their main source of income. The rest of Americans had to work to make a living. Sure, their higher wages and their social benefits may indirectly come from the super-profits of the multi-national companies they work for – but that is the result of the class struggle over the share of value going to wages, not directly as a result of imperialist exploitation. Imperialism has two Achilles heels. The first is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as capitalism accumulates. Indeed, imperialism is a major counteracting factor to that most important contradiction of capitalist accumulation. The second is the proletariat – the gravediggers of capitalism – who are still growing in size across the world. John Smith showed that global proletariat has never been larger in the history of capitalism. In that sense, Marx’s prophecy in the Communist Manifesto 160 years ago is confirmed. Sure, the majority of the proletariat is now in the South and not the North. But, in my view, that does not mean the workers of the North will play no role in ending capitalism. On the contrary, they are the key to ending imperialism in its centre. — Modern Imperialism and the Working Class
Videos of the Day:
“It’s Already Happening”: Ugandan Activist Vanessa Nakate on Deadly Climate Crisis in Africa
Paper Straws Are Not Enough. Only “System Change” Can Halt Climate Crisis, Says George Monbiot
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!
Biden to Saudi Arabia and Israel: Sure, Kill Our Journalists On his trip to the Middle East, Joe Biden’s efforts to paper over nominal allies’ atrocities against Americans sends a message of impunity. President Joe Biden’s trip to the Middle East is taking him to two countries whose governments are killers of American journalists. On an international tour designed to improve tense relationships with two nominal allies, Biden met with Mohammed bin Salman, the authoritarian crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid. Bin Salman was judged by the CIA to have ordered the infamous murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. permanent resident, in 2018 after the prince became enraged over Khashoggi’s criticisms. More recently, Israeli soldiers killed Al Jazeera journalist and American citizen Shireen Abu Akhleh in a shooting in the West Bank that investigative journalists have said bore the signs of a targeted killing by Israeli forces.
Disappointed by Climate Speech, Activists Say People Are Dying ‘While Biden Dithers’ “The world’s burning up from California to Croatia, and right now Biden’s fighting fire with the trickle from a garden hose.” “The world’s burning up from California to Croatia, and right now Biden’s fighting fire with the trickle from a garden hose.”
Docs Expose Trump’s ‘Illegal’ Effort to Help GOP by Weaponizing Census “This announcement is an affront to our personal rights and goes against the will of the vast majority of Georgians who believe in the bodily autonomy of all in our state.” Abortion rights defenders on Wednesday were down but determined after a federal appeals court lifted an injunction on Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, allowing the draconian law to take immediate effect. Writing for a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge William Pryor said that the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling voiding nearly 50 years of constitutional abortion rights “makes clear that no right to abortion exists under the Constitution, so Georgia may prohibit them.”
Docs Expose Trump’s ‘Illegal’ Effort to Help GOP by Weaponizing Census “It is clear that legislative reforms are needed to prevent any future illegal or unconstitutional efforts to interfere with the census and chip away at our democracy,” said the House Committee on Oversight and Reform chair. A U.S. House of Representatives panel probing the Trump administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census on Wednesday released a memorandum underscoring that the failed effort was politically motivated. The memo focuses on documents that were finally shared with the panel in January after former President Donald Trump’s commerce secretary and attorney general, Wilbur Ross and William Barr, were held in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over requested materials. “The documents ultimately obtained by the committee… shed additional light on the depth of partisan manipulation in the 2020 census.
Environment: Ecocide or Ecosocialism!:
Water From Major Greenland Ice Melt Could Fill 7.2 Million Olympic Swimming Pools “It definitely worries me,” said one scientist conducting research on Greenland’s ice sheet. “The amount of ice that melted in Greenland between July 15 and 17 alone—6 billion tons of water per day , , , That’s enough to cover all of West Virginia in a foot of water, the outlet noted. Last week, the state’s right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin refused to support any clean energy provisions in his party’s floundering reconciliation bill, which needs 50 votes to pass in the evenly split upper chamber. “The amount of ice that melted in Greenland between July 15 and 17 alone—6 billion tons of water per day—would be enough to fill 7.2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools,” CNN reported Wednesday, citing findings from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado.
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
- Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor BAR Book Forum: Crystal Eddins’ Book, “Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution”
- Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist Celebrating Revolution in Nicaragua
- Editors, The Black Agenda Review ESSAY: Negro Revolutionary Hero: Toussaint L’Ouverture, Cyril Briggs, 1929
- Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor BAR Book Forum: Steven W. Thrasher’s Book, “The Viral Underclass”
- Black Alliance For Peace Black Alliance for Peace Condemns Renewal of the UN Mission to Haiti (BINUH)
- Mark P. Fancher Oil and Imperialism in Africa
- Pavan Kulkarni “December Revolution’s rebirth”: Sit-ins Mark New Stage of Protests Against Sudan’s Military
- Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor The American Empire Has No Clothes
- The Tricontinental The PAIGC’s Political Education for Liberation in Guinea-Bissau, 1963–74 (Part 1)
- Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor Congresswoman Karen Bass and the Will to Intervene
- Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence Mr. Magoo, what’s new? “Oh, say, can you see?”
Labor:
Economy:
Is China headed for a Crash? Once again, Western ‘experts’ are predicting a financial crash in China. “China is flailing”, says one commentator; another says “a debt bomb is about to explode”. These would-be Cassandras reckon China’s demise will be driven by the bursting of the property bubble, excessive debt and the grinding down of the economy due to the government’s “terrible” ‘zero-COVID’ policy that keeps parts of the country in permanent lockdowns. And then of course, there are the growing restrictions on China’s exports and its investments abroad, imposed by the US and supposedly backed by its allies in Asia. How much truth is there in this latest batch of critiques on China’s economic progress? The property crisis has reached dangerous levels. Last year, Evergrande, China’s second-largest private property developer was close to bankruptcy. The Evergrande property model is essentially a Ponzi scheme, where the company collects cash from the pre-sale of an ever-growing number of apartments, plus hundreds of thousands of individual investors and uses the cash to fund further sales by accelerating construction in progress and funding down-payments. Like any Ponzi, this works as long as it’s accelerating. But when the market slows, those incoming streams of cash start to fall behind the growing arc of cash demands. Evergrande now has about 800 unfinished projects and there are about 1.2 million people waiting to move in. , . . . Having said all this, it is still the case that the public sector-dominated Chinese economy is and will do better than those in the West, the G7 economies. Here are the latest IMF forecasts for growth in the major economies. 
Secret Service Bio for Tony Ornato Says He Was Responsible for “All Aspects of” “Military Operations” that Supported Trump The official government website for the Secret Service has a bizarre and alarming bio for Anthony (Tony) Ornato, the Secret Service agent who was allowed by his superiors to become Assistant to President Donald Trump and Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations at the White House. The bio notes that Ornato “was detailed from the Secret Service” to assume these highly political roles. Because the Secret Service provides protective services to members of both political parties, it has historically been seen as a law enforcement agency that should studiously avoid any appearance of political bias. Ornato not only served under one of the most politically-toxic Presidents in U.S. history, whom tens of millions of Americans believe attempted to overthrow the U.S. government, but Ornato was allowed to return to the Secret Service and become Assistant Director of the Office of Training.
World:
Self-Determination for the People of Kosovo! Toward the Balkan Socialist Federation! The political position regarding Kosovo – within Serbia, and beyond in the former Yugoslavia – is often based on the mythology and prejudices of Serbian nationalism. Social conflicts between Serbs and Albanians, and political disputes over the international legal status of this territory are seen as a continuation of centuries of religious-ethnic conflict. At the same time, Albanians are seen as intruders in the ‘holy Serbian land’. Unlike metaphysical and ahistorical approaches, Marxists look for the roots of today’s ‘Kosovo question’ in the modern age, i.e., in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the Balkan nations and nation-states were formed. The ethnic composition and dividing lines between Serbs and Albanians were conditioned by the expansion of national consciousness and the weakening of Ottoman rule in the Balkans.
Ukraine’s Debt-Relief Plan Gets Backing From Key Creditors
- Major sovereign creditors, including US, back Ukraine request
- War-torn nation seeks to restructure $22.8 billion of debt
Ukraine’s request to postpone foreign-debt payments in the wake of Russia’s invasion won support from key government creditors and private bondholders. The government in Kyiv wants to agree with bondholders on a two-year payment freeze and changes to coupons on its so-called GDP warrants by the middle of next month. It filed a formal request to restructure $22.8 billion in sovereign debt on Wednesday.
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!