Daily News Digest August 2, 2022
Images of the Day:
Mike Luckovich: To Fry, Or Not? 
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:
What is “Net Neutrality?” It’s really three different things, none of them good. First, it’s corporate welfare for companies whose business models involve pushing lots of bits (like streaming high-definition video) through the Internet and into your home, and who’d rather not foot the bill for the infrastructure to carry their product. Second, it’s the Internet censorship camel’s nose pushing its way into the administrative state’s regulatory tent. Third, it’s a sexy-sounding solution desperately in search of a problem that does not and never has existed. The Internet has become incrementally better and more accessible for 30 years now without it. — “Net Neutrality” is Back. It’s Still a Corporate Welfare Scam and Internet Censorship Enabling Act
As the world urbanizes and industrializes, and as effects of climate change intensify, environmental crises will increasingly devastate the lives, health, and livelihoods of people around the globe. A lack of legal regulation and enforcement of industrial and artisanal mining, large-scale dams, deforestation, domestic water and sanitation systems, and heavily polluting industries can lead to a host of human rights violations. Activists and ordinary citizens defending their rights to land and the environment may face intimidation, legal harassment and deadly violence. The primary victims of environmental harm are often impoverished and marginalized communities with limited opportunity to meaningfully participate in decision-making and public debate on environmental issues, and have little access to independent courts to achieve accountability and redress. — 2012 Arantxa Cedillo for Human Rights Watch
The climate disaster is here, with temperatures soaring across Europe, the US and much of the northern hemisphere – and scorching summers becoming the norm. As scientific predictions become reality, the emergency is becoming palpable, indisputable and widespread, with dramatic weather events reported with an ever-increasing frequency. Such patterns have disastrous, far-reaching effects – for the natural world, global food supplies, health, infrastructure and more. — Lake Mead: Shrinking Waters Uncover Buried Secrets and Grisly Finds
Videos of the Day:
Why Julian Assassange Has Been Persecuted by the United States Capitalist Class — Honest War Reporting! The First Victim of War — Is The Truth! :The Media Monopoly’s Government Prroved Supervised War Reporting!: Government Supervised Times, Wartime Reporting, and More We talk to Patrick Lawrence about Ukraine by diving deeper into his recent articles written for ScheerPost.
Monkeypox Could “Dramatically Increase” Behind Bars, Calls for CDC Action
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
A CIA Whistleblower Reflects on the Persecution of Julian Assange This affront to accountability, press freedom, and freedom of speech is on stage for the entire world to see, yet I wonder who is paying attention. What has been happening to Assange is the very definition of complicity between two countries to jointly undermine accountability and freedom of speech!
Chris Hedges: When the Just Go to Prison When those who expose the crimes of the state are criminalized and sent to prison, tyranny is inevitable. When those who expose the crimes of the state are criminalized and sent to prison, tyranny is inevitable. MARION, Illinois — Daniel Hale, dressed in a khaki uniform, his hair cut short and sporting a long, neatly groomed brown beard, is seated behind a plexiglass screen, speaking into a telephone receiver at the federal prison in Marion, Illinois. I hold a receiver on the other side of the plexiglass and listen as he describes his journey from working for the National Security Agency and the Joint Special Operations Task Force at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to becoming federal prisoner 26069-07. Hale, a 34-year-old former Air Force signals intelligence analyst, is serving a 45 month prison sentence, following his conviction under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified documents about the U.S. military’s drone assassination program and its high civilian death toll. The documents are believed to be the source material for “The Drone Papers” published by The Intercept, on October 15, 2015.
Penal Assassination: The Gradual Effort to Kill Assange They really do want to kill him. Perhaps it is high time that his detractors and sceptics, proven wrong essentially from the outset, admit that the US imperium, along with its client states, is willing to see Julian Assange perish in prison. The locality and venue, for the purposes of this exercise, are not relevant. Like the Inquisition, the Catholic Church was never keen on soiling its hands, preferring the employ of non-church figures to torture their victims. In the context of Assange, Britain has been a willing jailor from the start, guided by the good offices of Washington and none too keen in seeing this spiller of secrets released into the world. Bail has been repeatedly, and inexcusably, refused, despite the threats posed by COVID-19, the publisher’s own deteriorating health, and restrictions upon access, at regular intervals, to legal advice from his team. Just as some banks are deemed too large to fail, Assange is considered too large a target to escape. Let loose again, he might do what he does best: reveal government venalities in war and peace and prove the social contract a gross deception and mockery of our sensibilities.
Environment: Ecocide or Ecosocialism!:
Declare Your Climate Emergency Today! We don’t need to wait for so-called leaders. The climate emergency has been declared over and over by Nature and by human suffering and upheaval in response to its catastrophes. Humanity can’t equivocate any longer. This is a climate emergency. The climate emergency has been declared over and over. The future the scientists warned us about is here, now We are declaring a climate emergency. Everyone can, in whatever place on Earth they call home. No one needs to wait for politicians any more – we have been waiting for them for decades. What history shows us is that when people lead, governments follow. Our power resides in what we are witnessing. We cannot deny that Great Salt Lake is vanishing before our eyes into a sun-cracked playa of salt and toxic chemicals. Nor can we deny that Lake Mead is reduced to a puddle. In New Mexico a wildfire that began in early April is still burning in late July. Last August, the eye of Hurricane Ida split in two – there was no calm – only 190mph winds ripping towns in the bayous of Louisiana to shreds; and 7m acres in the American west burned in 2021. The future the scientists warned us about is where we live now.
This Heatwave has Eviscerated The Idea that Small Changes Can Tackle Extreme Weather Dangerous heat will become the norm, even in the UK. Systems need to urgently change – and the silence needs to be broken Can we talk about it now? I mean the subject most of the media and most of the political class has been avoiding for so long. You know, the only subject that ultimately counts – the survival of life on Earth. Everyone knows, however carefully they avoid the topic, that, beside it, all the topics filling the front pages and obsessing the pundits are dust. Even the Times editors still publishing columns denying climate science know it. Even the candidates for the Tory leadership, ignoring or downplaying the issue, know it. Never has a silence been so loud or so resonant. This is not a passive silence. It is an active silence, a fierce commitment to distraction and irrelevance in the face of an existential crisis. It is a void assiduously filled with trivia and amusement, gossip and spectacle. Talk about anything, but not about this. But while the people who dominate the means of communication frantically avoid the subject, the planet speaks, in a roar becoming impossible to ignore. These days of atmospheric rage, these heatshocks and wildfires ignore the angry shushing and burst rudely into our silent retreat.
Hotter Than Dubai: US Cities at Risk of Middle Eastern Temperatures by 2100 Unchecked global heating will bring once unthinkable extreme heat, with 16 US cities to rival summer highs seen in Middle East The climate crisis risks pushing many Americans into entirely new climatic realities, with a new analysis finding there are 16 US cities at risk of having summer temperatures on a par with locations in the Middle East by the end of the century. Heatwaves have roiled huge swaths of the US this summer, placing nearly a third of the population under some sort of heat advisory and driving temperatures to as high as 115F (46C) in parts of the Great Plains. Hundreds of heat records have tumbled, from Boston, Massachusetts, which hit 100F (37C), to Portland, Oregon, which reached 102F (38.9C) on Tuesday.
Carbon Capture Won’t Work, But It Will Funnel Billions to Corporations Carbon capture is having a moment, and it’s not hard to see why: As Texas Monthly reports, “the worldwide carbon-capture market is expected to grow from about $2 billion this year to about $7 billion in 2028.” Last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law devotes billions to advancing the technology, and the new Senator Joe Manchin-approved climate compromise bill would do more to bolster the industry. Meanwhile, atmospheric CO2 levels have now reached their highest levels in human history, and the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, which limits the federal government’s power to reduce climate pollution, is making techno-fixes all the more appealing. There’s just one problem: There is no real evidence that carbon capture can or will do what its optimistic name suggests.
The Case Against Commercial Logging in Wildfire-Prone Forests When the Oak Fire swept through more than 10,000 acres southwest of Yosemite National Park last weekend, it burned through forests where widespread logging, including commercial thinning, accelerated in recent decades. Much of the forest canopy had been removed, exposing the remaining vegetation to more direct sunlight and creating hotter, drier and windier conditions that favor the spread of flames. But when the blaze reached the area hit by the Ferguson fire of 2018, it slowed to burning about 1,000 acres a day. The previous fire had left less available kindling such as dry leaves, pine needles, twigs and saplings on the forest floor.
Mediterranean Sea Ecosystem Threatened by Heat-Induced ‘Marine Wildfire,’ Scientists Warn Scientists are warning this week that the prolonged and above-average temperatures gripping the Mediterranean Sea are causing a “marine wildfire” that could permanently alter the ecosystem and cause species extinction. Ocean researcher David Diaz said such ocean heatwaves were “the equivalent of underwater wildfires, with fauna and flora dying just as if they had been burned.”
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
The Genetic Panopticon . . . Now we are all suspects in a DNA lineup waiting to be matched up with a crime. Suspect State, meet the Genetic Panopticon. DNA technology in the hands of government officials will complete our transition to a Surveillance State in which prison walls are disguised within the seemingly benevolent trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and the need to guard against terrorists, pandemics, civil unrest, etc. By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. It’s getting harder to hide, even if you think you’ve got nothing to hide. Armed with unprecedented access to DNA databases amassed by the FBI and ancestry website, as well as hospital newborn screening programs, police are using forensic genealogy, which allows police to match up an unknown suspect’s crime scene DNA with that of any family members in a genealogy database, to solve cold cases that have remained unsolved for decades.
Labor:
Economy:
Brace Yourself for Federally-Insured Bank Failures Caused by Crypto Last Thursday, during a Senate Banking Committee hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren apparently grabbed the attention of federal regulators when she stated that Voyager, the crypto platform that filed for bankruptcy protection in early July, was promoting itself as being FDIC-insured. FDIC stands for Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and is the federal agency that oversees federal deposit insurance for the nation’s regulated banks and savings associations. Crypto trading platforms and their lending operations are not federally regulated; they are frequently tied to criminal activity; they are increasingly going bust and/or filing for bankruptcy protection and locking customers out of making withdrawals of their liquid funds and/or their crypto. Letting crypto get anywhere near a federally-insured bank would undermine public confidence in FDIC-insurance and undermine public confidence in the safety and soundness of all federally-insured banks in the U.S. And yet, federal bank regulators have been completely aware for years now that federally-insured banks were becoming intertwined with crypto companies and have chosen to look the other way.
World:
UK: Energy Crisis: Which Way Forward – Consumer Boycotts or Class Struggle? With catastrophe looming for millions this winter, calls are growing for a non-payment campaign of energy bills. To succeed, such moves must be linked to mass action, and a clear political programme of nationalisation and socialist planning. Nowhere is the cost-of-living crisis clearer than out-of-control energy bills. Already in March, 1-in-7 people were in arrears, and 1-in-8 had gone without heating, water, or electricity. And now new forecasts show the price cap will rise to nearly £3,400 by the winter; significantly higher than the £2,800 predicted in May. Things are much worse than many predicted. More than a third of UK households could now face energy poverty this winter. And this is only the beginning. Industry experts are predicting that the price cap could be raised even further to £3,840 in January, with the most vulnerable hit by monthly energy costs of £500. Furthermore, bills of over £300 per month are expected to be the norm “well into 2024”.
China: The Henan Bank Run and the Mass’ Struggle Against Tyranny and Crisis A slew of banking crises, struggles, and repression have recently rocked the rural areas of Henan province in China. Earlier in the year, several local banks declared that customers could no longer withdraw their own savings. The depositors quickly organised a struggle against the banks, which were aided and abetted by the CCP bureaucracy. Despite living under the most technologically advanced surveillance state in world history, the depositors’ protests soon escalated from economic to political demands and slogans. These unprecedented developments garnered widespread attention across China, as many workers and youth fear for their future amidst lockdowns and real estate crises that threaten to spill into other sectors of the economy. After months of mass struggle and government repression, the Chinese state has begun returning the savings of depositors at five Henan and Anhui rural banks. However, nothing has been fundamentally resolved. These concessions won’t conceal the barbarous and reactionary nature of China’s despotic capitalism, which has been exposed by this event.
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!
We Are Not ‘In This Together’: The Biden Adminstration’s Covid-19 Policy Is Still Killing Vulnerable People . . . Our government has abandoned its responsibility to protect its citizens by blaming its failures on the very individuals it was elected to protect. The Biden administration’s failure to protect vulnerable people from Covid-19 is evident in CDC director Rochelle Walensky’s comments from January 7, 2022: “The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities. So really, these are people who were unwell to begin with. And yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.” Walensky’s comments caused widespread outrage in the disability community but they only hint at the magnitude of this administration’s cruel and normalized failure to protect vulnerable lives. In response to our outrage, the CDC, Biden, and their Covid-minimizing pundits continue to insist that our deaths are unfortunate, but inevitable. At the same time, they wage an ongoing campaign to convince the public that implementing simple measures to protect us would be too great a burden. In lieu of protecting the high-risk community with substantive public health policy like universal masking, improved ventilation, and adequate isolation periods, the CDC has assured us that it is “committed to continuing the dialogue,” and “working to help reduce health disparities… with initiatives including providing accessible materials and culturally relevant messages.”