Daily News Digest July 25, 2022
Images of the Day:
NASA Images of Shrinking Lake Mead Offer ‘Stark Illustration’ of Climate Crisis
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!
Quotes of the Day:
President Joe Biden said he will use his presidential powers to tackle the climate emergency. Every president since Washington has used executive powers in various ways, but it is unclear what Biden has in mind with regard to climate policy. For instance, he can issue an executive order power to stop approvals of all new fossil fuel infrastructure projects and ban federal fossil fuel leasing and drilling. Yet, he has been pushing all along for more oil production and approved more permits for oil and gas leasing on federal lands in 2021 than Trump did in the first year of his presidency. So, whom is he kidding when he talks about using the executive order power to tackle the climate emergency? — Chomsky: US Government’s Nonresponse to Climate Crisis Has Historical Precedent
Videos of the Day:
Floods and Droughts: An EPIC Response to These Hazards in the Era of Climate Change
What Happens When a Reservoir Goes Dry?
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!
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— Supreme Court Judge Louis D. Brandeis
Progressive Lawmakers Push Biden to Stop Transferring Military Weapons to Cops Militarized law enforcement increases the prevalence of police violence without making our communities safer,” 22 members of Congress asserted. Progressive Lawmakers Push Biden to Stop Transferring Military Weapons to Cops “Militarized law enforcement increases the prevalence of police violence without making our communities safer,” 22 members of Congress asserted.
Militarized Police Escalated Under Obama: Obama’s Coup D’état — A Police State In Imerging Learning from history and the recent events in the world, United States capitalism knows that a working class upsurge will result from its austerity programs. Therefore, the capitalist class is applying the Precautionary Principle, in order to be prepared to apply the iron heal to quash any upsurge. As their spokesman, Obama, is and has been slowly but surely setting up the police state iron heal. As Obama moves toward disarming the people and the working class, he is organizing an extra-legal domestic police force as capitalism, with Obama their spokesman, establishes a gradual slide into a police state — That would be the Envy of Hitler!
Les Miserables, Living and Dying on American Streets Statistics lie. Some lie more than others. The ones regarding unemployment lie brazenly and have done so for years, erasing the very existence of the long-term unemployed by simply deleting them from the regular tally. Statistics about homelessness lie. But they have an excuse: the homeless are hard to keep track of. So we’re told that roughly half a million Americans have no home. But that statistic is belied by one from the National Center on Family Homelessness, which says 2.5 million children are now homeless each year in America. Add those two numbers together and you get three million homeless Americans. But even that statistic probably undercounts the number of people sleeping in tents, cars, subways, cheap hotels, on friends’ couches or just out on concrete under the stars. So estimate, conservatively, that one percent of Americans are homeless. That percentage only moves in one direction: up. As the average American single-family dwelling price stays stratospheric despite the cratering real estate market (one of the miracles of modern finance) and rents skyrocket, millions of people stare into the abyss of homelessness. “The cost of living is going up so quickly,” Johns Hopkins University professor Meredith Greif told the Washington Post July 3, “—through the price of gas and food and rent – that more people can’t afford a place to live anymore. Everywhere you turn, prices are rising, but wages aren’t keeping up.” If you think this is some fluke, some mistake, you need seriously to reconsider your take on our economy. The game is rigged, and it’s been rigged like this longer than you’ve been alive.
Environment: Ecocide or Ecosocialism!:
Capitalism’s ‘Practicality’ While We Bake to Death During one of the hottest summers ever, we’re weirdly blasé. These days, 111 degrees in Lawton, Okla., or 110 degrees in Abilene, Tx., or 104 degrees in London is the price of maintaining a robust economy. While a fossil fuels-based economy always privileges profits over people and nature, most Americans go along because gas prices are the ultimate determiner of happiness. We have to be practical even as we’re baking to death. If we’re not mindful of the importance of markets in imposing reasonable limits on industry excess, the climate alarmists and the liberals will win. Many of us are old enough to remember a time when triple digit temperatures outside of Death Valley was considered freakish and a threat to the long term prospects of humanity.
Richest Profit. It Doesn’t Have To Be This “If Our Modern Societies Are To Continue To Exist In Recognizable Form, Oil Companies’ Assets Are Worthless.” Way As The Effects Of The Climate Crisis Are Seen In Global Heatwaves And Droughts, Oil Firms Are Booming. The Last Time Prices Rose This Fast Was 41 Years Ago. The Last Time The UK Got Through Prime Ministers This Fast Was The Mid-1970s. The Last Time There Was Open War Between Major European Powers Was In 1945. The Last Time The Northern Hemisphere Was This Hot Was Probably 125,000 Years Ago. Yet The Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 Is Worth More Than Ever, Corporate Profits Are Higher Than Ever, There Are More British Billionaires Than Ever. And Oil Companies Are Richer Than Ever. If We Took Climate Change Seriously, The Petroleum Industry Would Be Bankrupt. These Firms Borrow Billions Against The Future Value Of Reserves They Are Yet To Drill, But Atmospheric Physics Demands We Can’t Burn That Carbon If We Wish Civilization To Survive.
Greenland Loses 6 Billion Tons of Ice in 3 Days, Harbinger of Unprecedented Coastal Flooding If all Greenland’s ice melts, it would raise the seas by more than 24 feet. Independent reported this week on a massive ice melt in Greenland, with on the order of 6 billion tons of ice lost in three days. The melting was because of a heat wave at the top of the world, caused by our burning coal, gasoline, and methane gas and spewing billions of tons of the dangerous heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. These sorts of events are directly responsible for sea level rise and coastal flooding around the world and in the United States (which has a lot of coast if you think about it). Often it is the poorest and most disadvantaged who will suffer most severely from disruptions like storm surges, coastal erosion, salt water invasion of lagoons, and urban flooding.
New Mexico’s Megafires Mark a Turning Point Firefighters don’t normally allude to early English epics, but in a briefing on the massive Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire in northern New Mexico, a top field chief said, “It’s like Beowulf: it’s not the thing you fear, it is the mother of the thing you fear.” He meant that the flames you face may be terrifying, but scarier yet are the conditions that spawned them, perhaps enabling new flames to erupt behind you with no escape possible. The lesson is a good one and can be taken further. If tinder-dry forests and high winds are the mother of the thing we fear, then climate change is the grandmother. The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire blazed across 534 square miles of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the southernmost extension of the Rockies. Although the fire was the largest in New Mexico’s history, it had competition even as it burned. This spring, the Black Fire, a megafire of nearly equal size, devoured forests in the southern part of the state. The combined area of the two fires is roughly equal to that of Rhode Island, the American standard for landscape disasters on a colossal scale.
NASA Images of Shrinking Lake Mead Offer ‘Stark Illustration’ of Climate Crisis “This is not a drought, this is aridification,” said one water law expert. “This is the new world we live in.” Newly released images from NASA show how drastically decades of drought in the American West have caused water levels in crucial Lake Mead to decline, threatening water access for tens of millions of people and millions of acres of farmland. NASA Earth Observatory released satellite images of the reservoir, part of the Colorado River watershed, taken in early July 2000, 2021, and 2022.
Roaming Charges: The Sky is Frying As I sat down to write this on Thursday afternoon, more than 100 million Americans were sweltering under extreme heat warnings and that didn’t include the Pacific Northwest, where the vents of the blast furnace are slated to open on Monday sparking temperatures in the 100s for most of next week. (It’s a modest 87 at the moment here in Oregon City.). Meanwhile, this week the tarmac on the runways at London’s Heathrow Airport melted, after the temperature soared to 104F. (It had never been 100F there before at any time.) Fires burned across England, France, Portugal and Spain. The surface soil temperature in Spain spiked to 138F. People died on the streets, in their cars, on their bikes, in prisons and nursing homes. Europe’s response to this crisis is to restart shuttered coal plants. It’s raining where’s it’s never rained before. Ice frozen 10,000 years ago is melting into milky streams. Rivers that have run for 1,500 years are now seasonal creeks. 1,000-year floods are happening every 30 years. Forests are burning beyond their capacity to regenerate, while deserts are expanding in all directions. Alpine glaciers in the Alps and the Karakoram are collapsing. The cost of all is this enormous, hundreds of billions a year in the US alone. But one community’s catastrophe is another’s financial opportunity. Many of the same corporations driving the climate crisis and are making out on the other end “restoring” the damage–often underwritten by government subsidies on both ends.
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
Environmental Racism: Houston’s Cancer Alley: Climate Crisis Is Driving Flooding That Could Surface Toxic Soil in Cities Neighborhoods are facing the long-term impacts of toxic emissions from industrial facilities. For decades in Houston, where resident Bryan “Lucas” Parras grew up near the city’s shipping channel, neighborhoods have faced the cumulative impacts of toxic emissions. The area is crammed with industrial facilities, chemical plants and oil refineries. Pollution has become such an ingrained part of life, Parras said, that residents on the city’s East End automatically adjust to the health threats: limiting time outdoors, filtering their water and making sure to carry their inhalers in case of asthma attacks. “A lot of the pollution in Houston has just become normalized because there’s so much and because so little has been done,” said Parras, 45, and a co-founder of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services. The group, known as t.e.j.a.s., for years has advocated on behalf of impacted neighborhoods by providing residents with tools to protect themselves and the environment.
Labor:
Democrats and Trump Appointed Judge Block $18 Minimum Wage Vote: Right-Wing Judge Bars $18 Minimum Wage From California’s 2022 Ballot Sacramento County Superior Court Judge James Arguelles’ ruling stems from a dispute between the Living Wage Act campaign and the office of California’s Democratic Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who said county officials didn’t verify a sufficient number of signatures in time. As Cal Matters reported Friday, “The minimum wage campaign argued that Weber’s office confused county election officials because she told them they had until July 13 to finish the count, based on the requirement that counties get 30 working days for signature verification after campaigns turn in their petitions.” “Proponents collected 1 million signatures, but didn’t turn in signatures until May, Weber’s office said, making them late to start the clock,” the outlet explained. “By the June 30 deadline to qualify for this November’s ballot, several counties had not finished verifying signatures and the campaign fell short.”
Economy:
Michael Roberts: Europe: Caught in a Trap The major economies are moving closer to recession, if they are not already there; and yet the Euro area and the US are now in contraction territory (i.e. any level below 50). The composite PMIs (which put together both manufacturing and services) for the major economies in July show:
- US 47.5 (contraction)
- Eurozone 49.4 (contraction)
- Japan 50.6 (slowing expansion)
- Germany 48.0 (contraction)
- UK 52.8 (slowing expansion)
Nobody should be surprised by the Eurozone score, given the impact of sanctions on Russian energy imports, which is severely weakening industrial production in the core of Europe (see below). Germany’s industrial production has been contracting for over three months.
Michael Roberts Blog: That’s what the latest business activity indicators for the major economies are telling us. The Purchasing Managers Indexes (PMIs), as they are called, measure the monthly change in activity. Anything scoring above 50 means expansion; anything below 50 means contraction. Japan’s composite PMI (that’s manufacturing plus services) dropped to 50.6 in July from 53.7 in June – so just above contraction, but the lowest figure since February. But the Eurozone did drop below 50. The EZ composite PMI fell into contraction territory at 49.4 in July from 52.0 in June; the first contraction in private sector activity since February 2021, pushed down by a fall in factory activity (49.6 vs 52.1, the lowest in 25 months) and a slowdown in services (50.6 vs 53, the lowest in 5 months). The Eurozone is heading into a slump. The big shock was in the US. The US composite PMI also fell into contraction territory at 47.5 in July, down notably from 52.3 in June to signal a solid contraction in private sector output. The rate of decline was the sharpest since the initial stages of the pandemic in May 2020, as both manufacturers and service providers reported subdued demand conditions.
From the Secret Service to the Fed, Inspectors General Are Enablers to Corruption at the Agencies they Oversee The Inspectors General of federal agencies are supposed to be the first line of defense against corruption within that agency. Increasingly, they have become part of the problem of corruption, coverups and cronyism. The January 6 House Select Committee has now stumbled upon this problem in a big way. Hopefully, it will lead to meaningful legislative reform of a seriously broken system of “watchdogs” that increasingly operate as lapdogs. According to a letter sent by Ronald L. Rowe, Assistant Director of the Secret Service, to the January 6 House Select Committee on Tuesday of this week, the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent agency of the Secret Service, first requested text messages from the Secret Service more than a year ago. The request covered a full month of text messages prior to and including the January 6 attack for 24 Secret Service agents. The Inspector General’s office received just one text message in response, covering that entire month. Instead of blowing the whistle to Congress, the public and the January 6 House Select Committee, the Inspector General simply kept his mouth shut for more than a year.
World:
Leon Trotsky foretold the ‘Partnership’ Between the Trade Bureaucracy and the Boss: From Leon Trotsky and the Iron Heel: One must accentuate especially the role which Jack London attributes to the labor bureaucracy and to the labor aristocracy in the further fate of mankind. Thanks to their support, the American plutocracy not only succeeds in defeating the workers’ insurrection but also in keeping its iron dictatorship during the following three centuries. We will not dispute with the poet the delay which can but seem to us too long. However, it is not a question of Jack London’s pessimism, but of his passionate effort to shake those who are lulled by routine, to force them to open their eyes and to see what is and what approaches. The artist is audaciously utilizing the methods of hyperbole. He is bringing the tendencies rooted in capitalism: of oppression, cruelty, bestiality, betrayal, to their extreme expression. He is operating with centuries in order to measure the tyrannical will of the exploiters and the treacherous rôle of the labor bureaucracy. But his most “romantic” hyperboles are finally much more realistic than the bookkeeper-like calculations of the so-called “sober politicians.” It is easy to imagine with what a condescending perplexity the official socialist thinking of that time met Jack London’s menacing prophecies. If one took the trouble to look over the reviews of The Iron Heel at that time in the German Neue Zeit and Vorwärts, in the Austrian Kampf and Arbeiterzeitung, as well as in the other socialist publications of Europe and America, he could easily convince himself that the thirty-year-old “romanticist” saw incomparably more clearly and farther than all the social-democratic leaders of that time taken together. But Jack London bears comparison in this domain not only with the reformists. One can say with assurance that in 1907 not one of the revolutionary Marxists, not excluding Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, imagined so fully the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capital and labor aristocracy. This suffices in itself to determine the specific weight of the novel.
The Forde Report and the Lessons of the Corbyn Movement The much-awaited Forde report has been released, revealing the sabotage undertaken by the Labour right wing against Corbyn and his supporters. The left must learn from this episode: there can be no compromise with these class enemies. The long-delayed Forde report was finally released earlier this week. Commissioned by the Labour Party as an independent inquiry into the findings of the 2020 leaked report (aka ‘LabourLeaks’), Forde confirms what many on the left have known all along. Forde’s findings also completely vindicate Jeremy Corbyn’s own statement, which resulted in his suspension from the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) – a suspension that still stands to this day. Corbyn correctly asserted that allegations of antisemitism were used factionally by the right wing of the Labour Party, and that the previous left leadership had been continually sabotaged by Blairite bureaucrats and right-wing MPs.
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!