Daily News Digest August 17, 2022
Images of the Day:
Another Example Capitalism as a Failed System: World Capilalism Has Been Aware of the Comming Catastrophe of Global Warming 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 discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. If money . . . comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. — Capital”, Volume One, Part VIII, Chapter 31, (the) “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist”.
Videos of the Day:
“The Truth About Cell Phone & Wireless Radiation” Dr. Devra Davis At Melbourne University
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
Chris Hedges: We Are Not the First Civilization to Collapse, but We Will Probably Be the Last The archeological remains of past civilizations, including those of the prehistoric Cahokia temple mound complex in Illinois, are sobering reminders of our fate. . . .The more insurmountable the crisis becomes, the more we, like our prehistoric ancestors, will retreat into self-defeating responses, violence, magical thinking and denial. The historian Arnold Toynbee, who singled out unchecked militarism as the fatal blow to past empires, argued that civilizations are not murdered, but commit suicide. They fail to adapt to a crisis, ensuring their own obliteration. Our civilization’s collapse will be unique in size, magnified by the destructive force of our fossil fuel-driven industrial society. But it will replicate the familiar patterns of collapse that toppled civilizations of the past. The difference will be in scale, and this time there will be no exit!
During Both Obama and Trump Administrations, the Justice Department Has Looked the Other Way at Crimes by the Powerful Last Thursday evening, Justice Department Attorney General, Merrick Garland, held a brief press conference to announce that he had asked a federal court to unseal the search warrant and inventory receipts filed in connection with the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Palm Beach oceanfront home and beach resort, Mar-a- Lago. As part of his statement to the press, Garland said this: “Faithful adherence to the rule of law is the bedrock principle of the Justice Department and of our democracy. Upholding the rule of law means applying the rule of law evenly, without fear or favor.” Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans believe there is one set of laws for the rich and powerful and another let of laws for average Americans. According to a Gallup poll released on July 5, only 14 percent of Americans had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the U.S. criminal justice system. That is the lowest percentage of confidence in the criminal justice system in 28 years according to Gallup data.
The United States Looting of Afghanistan: Richest Country on Earth to One of Its Poorest: We’re Keeping the Money We Stole From You A foreign affairs columnist called the move by the Biden administration a “shortsighted, morally unconscionable, and potentially calamitous decision for a country on the cusp of universal poverty.” “The key question here isn’t just what happens if we send Afghanistan money and aid. It’s what happens if we don’t.” Exactly a year after the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan’s government, the Biden administration said it would not return any of the $7 billion in Afghan central bank assets that it commandeered earlier this year, despite pleas from both human rights groups and economists to help pull the impoverished country out of its economic crisis.
Drones Help Distant American Public From Its Deadly Forever Wars In the past, Washington needed everyone’s support behind military conflicts. Today it wants people to forget. Drones help them do that. When President Joe Biden announced on August 31, 2021, that the war in Afghanistan had ended, he also emphasized that the U.S. use of force in the region would continue. “We just don’t need to fight a ground war to do it,” he explained. “We have what’s called over-the-horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground—or very few, if needed.”
Repeal the Espionage Act World War I is the gift that just keeps on giving. Although the U.S. government’s intervention into this senseless, immoral, and destructive war occurred 100 years ago, the adverse effects of the war continue to besiege our nation. Among the most notable examples is the Espionage Act, a tyrannical law that was enacted two months after the U.S. entered the war and which, unfortunately, remained on the books after the war came to an end. In fact, it is that World War I relic that U.S. officials are now relying on to secure the criminal indictment of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks head who released a mountain of evidence disclosing the inner workings and grave wrongdoing on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment, especially with respect to the manner in which it has waged it undeclared forever wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Environment: Ecocide or Ecosocialism!:
The Climate Crisis and Breast Cancer The Impacts of the Fossil Fuel Industry The impacts of the fossil fuel industry on public health crises are well documented. In addition to these fossil-fueled health harms, the industry is also driving the climate crisis. There are grave health consequences of climate change that directly impact people living with and at risk of breast cancer. As severe climate changes are projected to increase, so will the frequency of extreme weather events such as hurricanes and tsunamis, heatwaves, and drought and wildfires. These events are known to increase health harms for people globally by 1) intensifying exposures to many chemicals that have been linked to higher breast cancer rates and worse outcomes and 2) creating the double burden of fossil fuels and climate catastrophe on the breast cancer crisis. The fossil-fueled health and climate crises affect us all. However, we cannot ignore that these issues must be addressed at the intersection of racism, classism, and sexism. As the climate crisis intensifies, so do the prevailing health injustices. Black, Brown, Indigenous and low-income communities are already on the front lines of fossil fuel impacts and as climate change worsens, these communities will bear an even greater burden of exposure.
‘Gross Negligence’: Popular Michigan River Hit With Second Chemical Spill in Four Years Spill is yet another example of how contamination from corporate polluters can endanger entire communities, critics say The FBI and local officials are investigating the recent release of dangerous chemicals into Michigan’s Huron River, a 130-mile-long waterway that is popular for fishing and recreation and supplies drinking water for more than 100,000 people in Ann Arbor as well as other south-eastern Michigan communities. On 29 July, Tribar Manufacturing, a maker of exterior trim components for vehicles located in a western suburb of Detroit, discharged up to 10,000 gallons of waste containing hexavalent chromium, a known carcinogen, into a local sewer system on, according to Michigan’s department of environment, Great Lakes and energy, the state’s environmental regulatory agency.
Drastic water Cuts Expected As ‘Megadrought’ Grips Western US States Officials say Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming must figure out how to use 15% less water Water cuts are expected to be announced Tuesday to western states in the grip of a severe “megadrought” that has dropped levels in the country’s largest two reservoirs to record lows. The flow of the Colorado river, which provides water to more than 40 million people across seven states and Mexico, will be stemmed to reduce supply to Arizona and Nevada initially, if the federal government confirms the proposal. The crisis, which has dropped levels in Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the US to an 80-year low of barely one-quarter its 28.9m acre-feet capacity, is threatening the future of the crucial river basin. It has also led to potential disruption of water delivery and hydropower production, forcing the US bureau of reclamation to consider drastic action.
In the Amazon, Political Power Grows Out of the Barrel of a Camera Lens The Territory is a real life, 21st century “cowboys and Indians” movie, pitting a Native people battling to preserve their homeland against settlers encroaching on their slice of Brazil’s southern Amazon rainforest. In doing so, warpaint-daubed Uru Eu Wau Wau warriors use traditional bows and arrows, as well as video and cellphone cameras, to defend their land and age-old way of life. In doing so, as director Alex Pritz reveals in this candid conversation, the Indigenous people are not only the subjects of The Territory, but also integral participants in the filmmaking process, actively helping to shape the representation of their screen image to themselves and the outside world. As such, The Territory is a landmark work in the history of Indigenous cinema.
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
The New Jim Crow: Working in Prison Fields Didn’t “Correct” Me, It Revealed the System’s Brutality If one was paid to design a system that exacerbates trauma for vulnerable women, this would be the ideal model. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) mission statement explains its rationale for prison: “Public safety” … “promote positive change” … “reintegrate … into society.” During my 15 years of incarceration, I’ve never witnessed anything to support this view. Those of us forced to work in the fields experience the extremity of this hypocrisy daily. My days of working in the prison fields have been an exercise in time-travel trauma. Triple-digit temps in a field of Black and Brown bodies, bent at the waist planting sweet potato slips, contribute to an overwhelmingly familiar sense of déjà vu. As I fall into the role that mirrors my ancestors, so do the guards. I pick okra between a grandmother and her granddaughter. I’m forced to sing to entertain my captors. The only white faces are armed on horseback. They scream expletives or address us by body description (“hey, big booty”), conviction (“hey, meth head”) or race (“hey, Español”). In all five of the prisons I’ve lived, most of the people who are permitted to work in the air-conditioned buildings and receive on-the-job certificates for parole are white. The prison job that doesn’t offer any certificates, though, is the field squad.
Labor:
Pesticide Exposure Killed my Husband—Farm Workers Need Better Protections Each year as many as 20,000 farm workers are poisoned and an estimated 11,000 fatalities occur worldwide. My husband, Alejandro, died from lung cancer in 2010. He was just 50 years old. For years, one of my husband’s jobs was to tend to the lettuce fields where we worked in Greenfield. Right after spraying pesticides and weed killers, he would go into the fields, working up the soil with a short-handled hoe so that the lettuce could grow. He would get really close to the ground, breathing in the dust and also the chemical residue that was there.
Economy:
World:
Patrick Lawrence: All Disquiet on the Eastern Front As Volodymyr Zelensky, the great statesman of our time, put it in a Washington Post interview published August 8, “Whichever kind of Russian… make them go to Russia.” Have you noticed the latest coming out of Eastern Europe—the Estonians, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Czechs, and let us not forget the Ukrainians? Suddenly everyone thinks it is a good idea to begin shutting Russians, as in all Russians, out of Europe. That’s it: No more Russians in Europe because…because they are Russian. End of story, as some people like to say.ic Freedom The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the greatest transformation mankind has yet undergone. This transformation had to contend with a colossal cultural lag: the Russian masses lived under enormous exploitation and cultural underdevelopment. 80 percent of people between 8 and 50 years old were illiterate; and in Central Asia, many languages did not even have a written alphabet. Deep economic hardship from the early years of the revolution accompanied this legacy of immense cultural backwardness. The revolution was not able to prioritise art in its early years, and yet from the outset, it sought to bring the masses out of their state of backwardness, starting with education. Children with empty stomachs went to school for the first time, although those schools were unfurnished, and every five schoolchildren had to share a pencil between them. The revolution attracted the best of the intelligentsia, with the youth at the forefront. In these conditions, a galaxy of artists and talented individuals flourished, and society took advantage of this. There were radical new advancements in every artistic discipline. Cinema, which achieved little development under tsarism, would rise to great heights.
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!