Daily News Digest August 12, 2022
Images of the Day:
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:
The ICC’s most serious problem, however, is that 70 nations, including the world’s major military powers, have refused to become parties to the treaty. The governments of China, India, and Saudi Arabia never signed the Rome Statute. Although the governments of the United States, Russia, and Israel did sign it, they never ratified it. Subsequently, in fact, they withdrew their signatures. — Why Should War Criminals Operate with Impunity?
The Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space (www.spaceforpeace.org) founded 30 years ago, in 1992, at a conference in Washington, D.C. is the leading organization internationally challenging the weaponization and use of nuclear power in space. In its description of the August 4th webinar, the American Nuclear Society asserts: “For decades, nuclear energy has played a role, sometimes minor and sometimes major, in humanity’s exploration and research of outer space. Many space experts, scientists, astronauts, and researchers believe that nuclear energy can fundamentally change how we live and work in extraterrestrial environments and that some missions, projects, and endeavors are nearly impossible without the involvement of nuclear technologies. As federal funding is being applied to nuclear projects for various space-based applications and opportunities, an expert panel will discuss how nuclear companies and researchers are poised to capitalize.” A video recording of the webinar can also be viewed at https://www.ans.org/webinars/view-space2022/, — The Space Race is Going Nuclear
Despite these advances, the ICC faces some serious problems. Often years after criminal transgressions, it must locate the criminals and people willing to testify in their cases. Furthermore, lacking a police force, it is forced to rely upon national governments, some with a minimal commitment to justice, to capture and deport suspected criminals for trial. Governments also occasionally withdrew from the ICC, when angered, as the Philippines did after its president, Rodrigo Duterte, came under investigation.
Videos of the Day:
Chris Hedges on Ukraine, NATO/Russia, Censorship & Julian Assange
“Bogus Charge”: FBI Raids African People’s Socialist Party; Group Dismisses Russian Influence Claims
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
Call for Solidarity After FBI Raids African People’s Socialist Party and Uhuru Movement The specter of a Biden administration-authorized Department of Justice (DOJ) initiated McCarthy-era witch hunt was posed in bold relief last week as FBI agents took aim at a Black liberation organization that has been a sharp critic of the U.S./NATO-backed war in Ukraine and a defender of poor nations threatened with U.S. sanctions, coups, embargoes and blockades. These include Cuba, Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Iran. Replete with flash/bang grenades deployed at 5:00 am on Friday, July 29 to startle African Peoples Socialist Party (APSP) leader Omali Yeshitela and his wife at their home in St. Louis, Missouri, FBI agents, carrying federal search warrants, ordered them to come out with their hands up. They were handcuffed and ordered to sit on the curb. The armed agents, accompanied by local police, proceeded to ransack their home, confiscating their files, computer equipment and cell phones.
There Are Good Reasons to Defund the FBI. They Have Nothing to Do With Trump. The FBI was created to prop up a system of rule based on white supremacy, inequality, injustice and state violence. . . . The January 6 attack on the Capitol showed us the deep fissures in the Back the Blue concept trotted out by the right in response to the Black Lives Matter protests of recent years. While conservatives claim to support the police, they do so on a very narrow basis. Police authority is desirable to them only as long as it is solely directed at what they perceive to be suspect classes, including poor people, BIPOC communities, trans people, immigrants, anti-fascists, sex workers, and other marginalized groups. Built into right-wing support for the police is an understanding — grounded in history — that police authority should not be exercised against the powerful classes, including the wealthy, the politically dominant — and white nationalists. This understanding is why many on the right do not view images of “Back the Blue” proponents beating Capitol police with their Trump flags as hypocritical. This seeming contradiction helps us get to a deeper truth about the nature of police power. The FBI in particular, and the police in general, were not created to provide justice. Instead, the history of the FBI is one of repressing movements for liberation and carrying out wars on marginalized communities in the guise of wars on drugs, crime, terrorism, gangs and communism, among other phenomena determined by the state to be threats. The FBI’s long-running stretches of state-sanctioned violence have served to criminalize those that challenge the status quo, either through organized resistance or through survival strategies that interfere with capitalist notions of protecting the private property and individual autonomy of the rich and powerful.
Report: Mar-a-Lago Search Prompted by Informer Who Told DOJ Trump Had Docs An informant reportedly knew where Trump was keeping classified documents that he improperly took from the White House. ources within the Department of Justice (DOJ) have indicated that a search warrant was executed on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday because an informant alerted the agency about White House documents being kept on the property, some of which are classified. Newsweek reported the details of how the search came about on Wednesday, citing two government sources with knowledge of the raid. The informant told government agents details about where Trump was hiding documents on the premises, the sources told the publication. Information about the informant has not been released. our free emails
Environment: Ecocide or Ecosocialism!:
No Habitat for Humanity Under Food for Profit Capitalism is a Failed System: Global Hunger Numbers Jump; 2.3 Billion are ‘Food Insecure’ The number of people affected by hunger globally rose to as many as 828 million in 2021, an increase of about 46 million since 2020 and 150 million since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a United Nations report that provides fresh evidence that the world is moving further away from ending hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition. The 2022 edition of The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report presents updates on the food security and nutrition situation around the world, including the latest estimates of the cost and affordability of a healthy diet. The report also looks at ways in which governments can repurpose their current support to agriculture to reduce the cost of healthy diets, mindful of the limited public resources available in many parts of the world
Historic Climate Bill, Say Clear-Eyed Critics, Still ‘Pours Gasoline on the Flames’ “Activists and frontline communities will continue fighting to stop fossil fuel corporations that threaten our air, our water, and a livable planet.” “This was a backdoor take-it-or-leave-it deal between a coal baron and Democratic leaders in which any opposition from lawmakers or frontline communities was quashed,” said one activist.
UK Weather: Drought Expected to be Declared In Parts of England on Friday Drought group preparing to meet as Met Office issues highest fire risk warning for much of England An official drought could be declared for parts of England on Friday as rising temperatures and tinderbox conditions prompted the Met Office to issue its highest warning under its fire severity index. The National Drought Group – made up of civil servants, the Environment Agency, water companies and other groups including the National Farmers’ Union – is due to meet on Friday to discuss the longest dry spell since 1976
Death Valley Floods Deemed a ‘1,000-Year Event’ “With climate change models predicting more frequent and more intense storms, this is a place where you can see climate change in action,” said the park superintendent. Last week’s historic rainfall and flash flooding that caused widespread damage and left hundreds of staff and tourists stranded in Death Valley National Park is another clear sign of how extreme weather is being intensified by the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency, experts say.
Civil Rights/Black Liberation: 
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist Nancy Pelosi, White Supremacy, and China White supremacist arrogance was the order of the day when Nancy Pelosi ignored a red line set by the Chinese government and visited Taiwan. The Speaker of the House showed stereotypical and racist attitudes towards that country and began a chain of events that won’t go well for the U.S. “When I was a little girl, I was told at the beach if I dug a hole deep enough, we would reach China, so we’ve always felt a connection there.” _ Nancy Pelosi, August 5, 2022, in Tokyo, Japan Nancy Pelosi is a member of the United States Congress. She isn’t just any member either, she is Speaker of the House of Representatives, an to the presidency. If something should happen to the President and Vice President she would lead the Executive Branch of government. Her position makes her statement about digging a hole to China all the more disgraceful. It is an old trope which gives expression to China’s perceived otherness, that it isn’t just far away, it is actually the very opposite of how Americans see themselves in all their racist and exceptionalist glory.
Labor:
Economy:
Shadow Governmeny Statitics Daily Update – August 11th to 12th [Posted August 11th, 4:00 p.m. ET] – Today’s headline, July 2022 limited-history PPI Inflation softened month-to-month and year-to-year, off record highs of recent months, given declining gasoline/ energy prices, but otherwise at broad levels last seen 47-years ago in its traditional Finished Goods Series (Bureau of Labor Statistics – BLS). Similarly, although gasoline-price depressed off recent peaks, July 2022 CPI Inflation measures otherwise still were the highest seen in 75-years ago (ShadowStats-Alternate) and 41-years ago (BLS). Recently covered July 2022 Payroll Employment purportedly regained its Pre-Pandemic Peak by a minimal (albeit not statistically significant) 0.02% or 32,000 jobs; Real Second-Quarter 2022 GDP showed a second consecutive quarterly contraction, consistent with a “New Recession,” induced by the FOMC (see July 27th discussion). A renewed downturn appears to be in play, despite intensifying official obfuscation already underway. June 2022 Money Supply showed no noticeable slackening in headline money growth or anything suggestive of pending Inflation relief.
FRED: Producer Price Index by Commodity
The Truth About Markets, Pillar of Capitalist Ideology “Market mechanisms” and “market solutions”: politicians, bureaucrats, media pundits, and academics like to refer to them as if they were somehow politically and ideologically neutral, above partisanship. They are not. Or as if they were uniquely fair and optimally efficient, which they are not either. The market is just another human institution invented and reinvented periodically across human history. Just like other institutions, markets were strictly regulated or altogether excluded when human communities rejected their outcomes as socially unacceptable. Philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle shared profound criticisms of markets and debated over efforts to exclude or regulate them. Many more critics and debaters followed, thereby enriching the tradition of market criticism. Markets are one way of distributing goods and services from producers to consumers. They are established when divisions of labor occur in communities rather than having each person or family produce all that it consumes. Markets involve quid pro quo exchanges between those seeking to sell and those seeking to buy goods and services. Alternatives to markets always existed and also do now. Councils of elders, chiefs, local governmental authorities, religious authorities, and various cultural traditions, separately or together, have distributed products from producers to consumers, deciding who gets how much. Within households or families, kinship rules, including patriarchy and matriarchy, have organized the distribution of products from producers to consumers.
Behind Rolling Stone’s Hatchet Job on a Psychiatrist Critical of Neoliberal Capitalism Welcome to the Twilight Zone of the political landscape of psychiatry, where faux-left liberals are clueless that they have unwittingly become right-wingers, where shameless right-wingers exploit anything in an attempt to hold on to their AR-15s, and where anti-authoritarian left critical thinkers know that if they are not careful—or even if they are—they will find themselves being used politically in a repulsive way. In January 2022, when British psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, co-chairperson of the Critical Psychiatry Network, published “The Political Economy of the Mental Health System: A Marxist Analysis”—an examination of how psychiatry was diverting Western societies from the suffering caused by neoliberal capitalism—she was simply ignored by the mainstream media. However, in July 2022, after Moncrieff published “The Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Systematic Umbrella Review of the Evidence,” she became public enemy #1 for establishment psychiatry and its apologists in the mainstream media, including Rolling Stone.
Astonishing Charts from New York Fed Show the Dire Straits of U.S. Consumers During the 2008 Crash and Its Aftermath — Versus Today At his July 27 press conference, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said this: “Households are generally in about as strong a financial shape as they’ve been in a very long time – or perhaps ever given the money that’s on people’s balance sheets. So you have a pretty – from a financial stability standpoint – you have a pretty decent picture.” That statement captures a rear view mirror look at U.S. households. The picture is deteriorating rapidly. More on that in a moment, but first a look at some hair-raising charts that capture the dire straits of U.S. households during the 2008-2010 financial crisis versus today. The New York Fed released its Household Debt and Credit Report for the second quarter of 2022 last week. It showed total household debt rising by $312 billion in the second quarter to reach an historic high of $16.10 trillion. Also setting a new historic record was mortgage debt, which climbed to $11.39 trillion and represented 70.5 percent of all household debt.
World:
A Socialist and a War Resister Willy died 39 years ago. He suffered from his personal flaws. He pissed away thousands of dollars betting on horses and dogs. Despite a photograph from the late 1940s of Willy holding me in his arms at the seashore, we had no significant relationship. My last memories of him are of us smoking cigars together in the lounge of the nursing home where he spent the last 22 years of his life. He loved cigars and perhaps this was a way of me finding a way to him. I don’t know. Because of the ravages of a cerebral hemorrhage, he spent those years in the nursing home mostly incoherent and unable to express himself. Willy was a war resister from the Russian army in that part of Russia and Eastern Ukraine that moved from one nation to another, depending on the winds of war. Those who study history know that history does not precisely repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes, sometimes violently because of that part of humankind that denigrates human worth, subverting that worth through violence because of greed and power and status. This writing is not meant to assess the current war in Ukraine, but some of the same lethal forces that were obvious during the first quarter of the 20th century are, to a degree, operating today.
Netherlands: Farmers’ Protests Express the Impasse of Dutch Capitalism Since June, the Netherlands has seen a new wave of militant, 40,000-strong farmers’ protests, aimed against government plans to reduce the emission of nitrogen compounds. These protests have reached the international media, with videos proliferating of heavy tractors blocking roads and supermarket distribution centres, and dumping manure outside the homes of politicians. What lies behind these protests, what class interests do they represent, and what is the position of the Marxists towards them? In October 2019, the Netherlands saw a first wave of protests, with farmers in tractors demonstrating and causing long traffic jams. They were resisting plans by the Mark Rutte government to scale back the stock of cattle in the country by 30 percent, in order to reduce the emission of nitrogen compounds. Many farmers feared that this slowdown of livestock production would cause many farms to go bankrupt. In the past few months, these protests have returned on a larger scale.
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!