Daily News Digest August 31, 2022
Images of the Day:
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!
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!
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:
Videos of the Day:
Police Repress Protest in Puerto Rico
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!
Open Letter to President Biden About COVID Vaccines for Cuba President Biden: You recently referred to Cuba at a White House saying: “I would be prepared to give signifi cant amounts of vaccines if… an international organization would administer those vaccines and do it in a way that average citizens would have access to those vaccines.” You also called Cuba a “failed state”. These statements surprised many, including those in the U.S. who have fi rst-hand exposure to Cuba’s health system. It also rankled frontline Cuban health workers risking their lives to contain the COVID epidemic in our country. They do not refl ect Cuban reality, and we deplore that disinformation by malicious actors is infl uencing your policy decisions. As scientists, doctors, and concerned citizens, we believe it’s worth fact-checking three assumptions implicit in what you said. Assumption one: International intervention is needed to ensure all Cubans receive vaccines. Assumption two: Cuba’s response to the pandemic has been dismal, symptomatic of a “failed state”. Assumption three: U.S.-supplied vaccines are the only route to guarantee COVID-19 immunization for Cuba’s 11 million people. Let’s take these one by one: the fi rst assumption—that intervention is needed to guarantee vaccine access for all Cubans—suggests that vaccine rollout in Cuba is ineffi cient and discriminatory. But the data does not support this. In fact, as both UNICEF and the World Health Organization have confi rmed, childhood vaccination rates are over 99%. Immunization is part of our country’s universal public health system, free to all Cubans regardless of socioeconomic status, politics, religion, sex, or race.
U.S. Response to above letter: Days After Approving Another $3 Billion for Ukraine War, US Says No More Money for Free Covid Tests “Well this is quite exactly the wrong thing to do going into fall/winter,” said one infectious disease doctor. Public health advocates on Monday warned that the imminent suspension of the Biden administration’s free at-home Covid-19 test program could lead to the autumn and winter surge in infections that officials have feared for months, and denounced the obstruction of Republicans who have refused to pass continued Covid-19 relief this year—even as they’ve approved hundreds of billions of dollars in military spending.
59% in US Living Paycheck to Paycheck as Corporate Profits Surge to All-Time Highs ‘ Corporate profits hit a record $2 trillion in the second quarter. Meanwhile, many workers are unable to afford a $400 emergency payment Corporate profits hit a record $2 trillion in the second quarter. Meanwhile, many workers are unable to afford a $400 emergency payment. A new report out Monday shows that 59% of U.S. consumers were living paycheck to paycheck last month and many were unable to afford an emergency expense of $400—all while the country’s corporations enjoy record-shattering profits.
Enough With the Unseemly Whining About Student Debt Forgiveness! The greed, self interest and racism of US citizens never ceases to amaze and appall me. President Biden was dragged, against his own wishes, into using his executive authority to cancel a paltry $10.000 in federally insured student college debt for all those former students with current income of less than $125,000, and an extra $10,000 in forgiveness for those former students who had qualified for Pell Grants — a need-based federal scholarship frant limited to students whose families had annual incomes of below the poverty time at the time they were attending college. Now most Republicans in Congress or running for Congress — an institution known appropriately as a “millionaires’ club” because so many of its elected members either ran for office having millions of dollars in assets or became millionaires in office because of the corruption of the US political system — are opposing this Biden executive order, claiming it will be inflationary, will cost too much, isn’t fair to taxpayers. But perhaps even worse, are many ordinary Americans, most of them upper middle class or wealthier, who are grousing because they paid off their student loans on their own and don’t think their taxes should have to go to fund a cancellation of debt for poorer former students who have not repaid theirs!
Environment: Ecocide or Ecosocialism!:
Melting of Greenland Ice Sheet Poised to Trigger Almost a Foot of Sea-Level Rise: Study If the world halted planet-heating pollution today, the ice sheet would lose more than 3% of its mass in the coming decades, scientists warn. To prevent even worse outcomes, immediate climate action is needed. The fossil fuel-driven climate emergency has already locked in so much ice melt in Greenland that sea levels will surge by nearly a foot in the coming decades, peer-reviewed research published Monday warns, underscoring the need to rapidly transform virtually all aspects of the global political economy. Even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the Greenland ice sheet is set to lose at least 3.3% of its mass, or 110 trillion tons of ice, and that will cause almost a foot in global sea-level rise (SLR), says the study, published in Nature Climate Change. The authors don’t specify a time frame for the melting and SLR, though they expect much of it to happen between now and 2100.
Environment Agency Tells Staff to Ignore Pollution Complaints, Says Ex-Employee EA ‘shutting down’ calls from public about rivers, says former worker Helen Nightingale, leading waterways to deteriorate England’s rivers will continue to deteriorate unless the Environment Agency stops “shutting down” the public’s calls about pollution, according to an ex-employee who worked at the agency for three decades. Officers are told to ignore calls from the public and told not to look at possible incidents if the caller thinks they are lower impact, meaning they fall into so-called category 3 or 4. This has left staff “demoralised” says Helen Nightingale, a catchment planner in north-west Lancashire who left the Environment Agency in April.
Mississippi Capital Without Drinking Water Indefinitely After Pump Failure ‘Do not drink the water,’ Jackson residents told, leading to emergency distribution of bottled water for 180,000 people Mississippi’s capital, Jackson, will go without reliable drinking water indefinitely, officials said, after pumps at the main water treatment plant failed on Monday, leading to the emergency distribution of bottled water and tanker trucks for 180,000 people. The city linked the failure to complications from the flooding of the Pearl River, but Mississippi’s governor, Tate Reeves, who declared a state of emergency, said the cause was unknown and that the city-run water treatment plant had been poorly operated and understaffed for years.
Climate-Fueled Wildfires Are Depleting the Ozone Layer, New Study Shows Experts say aerosols generated by Australian wildfires in 2020 likely created an ozone hole over most of Antarctica Scientists were stunned in early 2020 when bush fires that spread across Australia generated their own extreme weather patterns, including thunderstorms — and a study published last Thursday revealed the blazes had an even greater climate impact than previously known.Researchers at University of Exeter in England found that aerosols from the smoke created by the fires caused the highest temperatures in the Earth’s stratosphere in decades and likely created a hole in the ozone layer over most of Antarctica. With global fossil fuel extraction and the global heating it causes showing few signs of slowing down, extreme weather events like the bush fires are likely to continue, said the authors of the study — and with them could come more damage to the ozone layer.
Beware the Climate Risks of War Over the Arctic Along with risking greater conflict between the nited States and Russia, a U.S. military build-up in the Arctic threatens to exacerbate climate change. A recent Senate proposal would needlessly create conditions for conflict with Russia while generating more greenhouse gas emissions On August 3, members of the Senate showed their own interest in a larger military presence in the region with the introduction of the Arctic Commitment Act. Introduced by Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Angus King (I-Maine), the legislation proposes “a persistent, year-round presence of the Navy and the Coast Guard in the Arctic region.” and Braz
Civil Rights/Black Liberation:
The Color of Suffering: Black and Blue “My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child: But I am black as if bereav’d of light.” — – William Blake, “The Little Black Boy,” Songs of Innocenc. \Othering is built right into the Latin word for Black. Westerners haven’t spoken Latin regularly in millennia, although we Blancos still use the N- word. We like the N-word. It differentiates Us from them. As we look out at the competition, maybe we muse that roughly 14% of the population is subdued and regularly beaten down by fascist forces of ignorance and dark energy that from the beginning of our illustrious culture and ballyhooed Constitution have regarded the Black race as not only Other, but Lesser, deeming him ⅔ of a man by law. Black people love white people, and white people struggle to be human, writes Franz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks.
Labor:
Economy:
Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update – August 30th to September 1st [Updated August 30th, 3:15 p.m. ET] – No. 1461 likely will post over the weekend. The posting date will be pre-announced here definitively, with as much notice as possible. The next major economic release is July Construction Spending on September 1st.
- University of Michigan’s August Consumer Sentiment continued its early month improvement, although still holding more than 40% (-40%) below pre-Pandemic levels. A new Recession signal remains intact, with quarterly GDP and GNP contractions in place for both First- and Second-Quarter 2022. Indeed, a renewed downturn appears to be in play, despite the intensifying official obfuscation that already is underway. The “Preliminary” Payroll Benchmark Revision for March 2022 was minimally to the upside by 0.3%. Headline July 2022 New Orders for Durable Goods were “unchanged” against minimally revised activity in June.
- July Money Supply continued to increase, showing no noticeable slackening suggestive of pending Inflation relief. Compounding recent negative news out of the Housing Markets, July 2022 New Home Sales plunged year-to-year by 29.6% (-29.6%) along with declining Existing Home Sales and Residential Construction covered in the August 19th review of these ever-evolving Housing numbers and rapidly deteriorating economic conditions. July 2022 Retail Sales, showed an early suggestion of a quarterly contraction in Third-Quarter 2022 inflation-adjusted Real Retail Sales activity, following revisions to and slowing growth in annual and monthly July Industrial Production, and the sharp collapse in July Housing Starts to a Pre-Pandemic low.
- 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-prices are depressed off recent peaks, July 2022 CPI Inflation measures otherwise still were the highest seen in 75-years (ShadowStats-Alternate) and 41-years (BLS).
Thoughts on Industrial Policy There is much confusion surrounding the concept of industrial policy, starting at the definitional level. If we think of industrial policy as a set of policies designed to favor certain industries, then we are always doing industrial policy. For example, the decision to have the government finance the construction of airports supports the airline industry, as well air freight, just as the decision to build the highways 70 years ago supported the auto industry and the suburbs. We spend over $50 billion a year on biomedical research, which is a huge subsidy to the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries. In short, industrial policy is not an on-off switch. We are always practicing industrial policy; the only issue is which industries we choose to favor and how we structure the mechanisms Recent legislation approved by Congress, the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), have been seen as big steps in advancing industrial policy. While there is much positive in these bills, there are three important areas where the legislation falls short:
- The ownership of intellectual property
- The price of clean energy products supported through the IRA
- The false promise of manufacturing jobs
JPMorgan Chase’s Stock Is a Dog – Put on a Leash by the Fed and Down 28 Percent Year-to-Date According to YCharts (give the chart time to load) since January 1, 2017 through December 31, 2021 – a span of five years – JPMorgan Chase has spent a total of $84.312 billion buying back its own stock. In eight of those quarters, it spent more than $5 billion buying back its own shares. In the three quarters when JPMorgan Chase was on a secret feeding tube from the Fed via the Fed’s emergency repo loans and other emergency programs, the bank bought back the most stock in its history according to YCharts: $6.949 billion for the quarter ending September 30, 2019; $6.751 billion for the quarter ending December 31, 2019; and $6.517 billion for the quarter ending March 31, 2020. Now, the unthinkable has happened. The Fed has actually put JPMorgan Chase on a leash. As a result, the bank is currently unable to buy back its stock and, as a result, the bank’s shares are down 28 percent year-to-date.
World:
Police Repress Protest in Puerto Rico as People Continue to Demand End of Contract with LUMA Puerto Ricans are protesting constant power outages, after their electrical grid was partially privatized. They are demanding that the private electric company, LUMA, have its contract canceled. In response, they have faced repression and police brutality. Puerto Ricans have taken to the streets once more to demand that private electricity company LUMA, which is in charge of the transmission and distribution of power, have its contract canceled. Hundreds of protesters gathered in front of La Fortaleza (the governor’s residence) in Old San Juan to demand the cancellation of the contract with LUMA and the resignation of Governor Pedro Pierluisi.
Puerto Rico: Protest Against Privatised Electrical Company, LUMA, Met With Police Brutality On Thursday 25 August, Old San Juan was engulfed in tear gas as units of Puerto Rican riot police once again brutally suppressed a protest opposite the Governor’s Palace. The protest’s main demand was the cancellation of the contract privatising the transmission and distribution of power. This week, the population’s anger against the privatised company, LUMA, came to a head following a series of events which have demonstrated the incompetence of the subsidiary of the multinational Quanta Services and ATCO in effectively managing the electrical infrastructure.
Health, Education 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!
FTC Files ‘Urgently Needed’ Suit Against Data Broker, Citing Threat to Abortion Patients “This lawsuit highlights the very real threats that data surveillance poses to peoples’ safety, security, bodily integrity, and access to healthcare,” said the head of Public Citizen. “It’s a critical step to crack down on data brokers selling sensitive location data—including at healthcare clinics,” . . . In a statement about the new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) suit, Robert Weissman, president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, noted the increased threat posed by those trying to ban and criminalize abortions, and punish those who seek them.
Shortchanging the Patients While Enriching the Insurer There should be no out-of-pocket barriers to care when it is needed. This is why all existing programs that privatize Medicare must be ended and any new such efforts opposed. Advocates of universal health care are currently battling the effort by corporate forces, both outside and within the Medicare, to privatize the portion of the program that is now fully public. These corporate interests aim to insert between Medicare and the medical professionals who actually provide care a private, for-profit corporation—through the controversial (and recently rebranded) privatization scheme called ACO REACH—which will be paid for each Medicare recipient “aligned” with an affiliated provider. Those for-profit ACO REACH providers will benefit not only by receiving more from Medicare than it pays its affiliated providers, but also they will share any “savings”—that is, reductions in care—they generate as profit.