Daily News Digest September 5, 2022
Labor Day
Why I Do Not Celebrate Labor Day But I celebrate May Day!
May Day/ Labor Day
I celebrate May Day, but I don’t celebrate Labor Day — I just observe it. To me, Labor Day means the codification of the labor bureaucracy’s subservience to the capitalist class. That was the original purpose for the United States capitalist class when it made labor day a holiday. It was organized as such in opposition to the Labor Day that was/is celebrated everywhere else in the world — a demonstration class solidarity! — May Day! May Day was celebrated, in memory of the martyrs of the Haymarket Massacre in 1886 Chicago and the unending struggle of the world working class for their “unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Image of the Day:
‘Worst Yet to Come’ as Global Civil Unrest Index Hits All-Time High
Laura Gray’s cartoon from the front page of The Militant August 18, 1945, Under the Banner Headline: “There Is No Peace”
Capitalism as a Failed System: World Capilalism Has Been Aware of the Comming Catastrophe of Global Warming 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 very 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!
Images of the Day:
The Flag Only Stands for the 1%!
Quotes of the Day:
May Day was thus created by the workingmen themselves, in defiance of the capitalist class and its governments, and up to the present time the working people in many countries are compelled on the First of May to fight for their holiday at the sacrifice of their jobs, liberty, blood, and even life. When the police and cossacks of different countries appear on the scene on May Day it is always for the purpose of clubbing, maiming, arresting, and killing working people; for the police and cossacks recognize that May Day is the drilling day for the Social Revolution. The American Labor Day, on the contrary, was a “gift” which the workers received from their masters, the capitalists, through the capitalist politicians. That first Monday in the month of September was made a legal holiday under the name of Labor Day, at first by the legislature of one state some thirty years ago; the politicians of other states followed the clever example, so that at present Labor Day is a legal holiday all over the country. A vampire, when he settles down upon the body of a sleeping person and sucks its blood, is known to fan his victim with his wings, to soothe the victim’s pain, and to prevent him from waking up and driving the vampire away. So was the Labor Day created by the political agents of thc American capitalists to fan the sleeping giant, the American working class, while the capitalists are sucking its blood. American Labor Day can also be considered as a modern, capitalist version of the ancient custom of the days of serfdom and slavery. In those days the mastens, for recreation and amusement, often-times set aside one day to celebrate the “enthronment of slaves.” —Boris Reinstein, International May Day and American Labor Day
Videos of the Day:
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 the poor and gives to the Rich. Rax the 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.” ― Louis Brandeis
Environment: Ecosocialism or Ecocide!
We are currently heading directly towards civilizational collapse. We need to switch into climate emergency mode as a society.” — Dr. Peter Kalmus
Why the scientists leaked their report, prior to the the last IPCC meeting!: McGuire’s thesis, in turn, is relevant to an article dealing with politically charged, compromised Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports: Big Oil’s Capture of IPCC Assessment for Policymakers ‘Shakes Our Faith’ (Commentary), Mongabay, August 25, 2022. Big Oil’s Capture is all about the necessity for the public to know that IPCC reports are edited by oil and gas representatives and governments that are fossil fuel depend-ent, exercising a hand in the final drafting of IPCC reports. Yes, the same publicly lambasted interests that cause global warming also write and/or edit portions of the all-important IPCC reports. Full stop! Nothing more needs to be said to fully understand the dichotomy between McGuire’s exposure of the dangers of climate change and doctored IPCC reports, claiming, in so many words: It can be fixed. “Don’t worry” as an underlying message, “carbon capture will fix it,” etc. etc. etc. But wrong and misleading on several counts! How Bad Can It Get?
We Need a World Without Borders on Our Increasingly Warming Planet Mass migration is an outcome of the crises of capitalism, conquest and climate change, says Harsha Walia. As we witness an increase in global migration amid a growing anti-immigrant sentiment, it is vital to remember that migration is mainly an outcome of political and economic processes associated with imperial conquest and capitalist globalization. Yet both liberal and conservative media exhibit similar bias toward migrations by treating them as problems that stem “from over there,” Harsha Walia points out in an exclusive interview for Truthout. Instead of accepting these false terms, Walia argues, we must recognize “there is no crisis at the border and there is no crisis of migration,” but instead a crisis of global apartheid. Walia makes a case for a world without borders.
Maybe Civilization Was a Mistake, After All Civilization was possibly a mistake. It led to capitalism five hundred years ago, and that was unquestionably, absolutely a mistake. Capitalism now consumes the planet. It expands like a metastasizing cancer over the face of the earth, heating the atmosphere to unbearable levels and at the current rate may well destroy our world within another hundred years.1 We would do well to replace it with something that won’t render the globe uninhabitable. But what? Well, of the 200,000 years that humans have dwelled on this planet, 95 percent of that time we were hunter gatherers. We had better health, greater longevity than our agricultural descendants who ruled for millennia before the current, unfortunate arrangement, less patriarchy, lived without direct authority over us, and, critically, we didn’t ravage the earth.
- Global Warming is self accelerating!: Most environmental projections are based upon the current rate of global warming will remain contant. Actualy as the global warming increases, asthe rate of global warming increases, globalwarming increases the rate of global warming increases ect..
Roaming Charges: Losing It I see you standing on the other side
I don’t know how the river got so wide, I loved you baby way back when, And all the bridges are burning that we might have crossed, But I feel so close to —everything that we lost. We’ll never, we’ll never have to lose it again! — Leonard Cohen, Tower of Song. The scale of the destruction defies the imagination. There are images and maps. But still you can’t quite wrap your mind around it. With reason. We’ve never seen anything like this. Never experienced it. Heard stories about it. There’s nothing to compare it to, not even the Biblical floods. We’ve gone beyond our own myths and legends. A third of an entire country–a big country, a country the size of Turkey and Venezuela–lies underwater, inundated by fierce floods from all directions.
Shell Ruling in South Africa a ‘Victory Against Capitalist Extraction and Destruction of Our Future’ “Winning this means we are all moving towards an understanding that we need to find sustainable livelihoods; we need to move away from fossil fuels,” said one local campaigner. Climate campaigners across South Africa and beyond celebrated a Thursday court ruling against Shell seismic blasting in search of fossil fuels along the country’s Wild Coast, which opponents warned threatened both the local marine life and fishing industry.
CO2 Levels Are the Highest in a Million Years as Extreme Weather and Flooding Rage Across the Globe We can change all this, but we have to hurry to shut down CO2 emissions quickly. CNN reports that satellite photos show that the overflowing Indus has created a new body of water in southern Pakistan some 62 miles (100km) wide. It will take days or weeks for the water to recede, and in the meantime millions are left homeless and over all, 33 million people have been affected by the worst monsoon floods in recorded history. CNN quotes Pakistan’s Climate Minister Sherry Rahman as saying “That parts of the country ‘resemble a small ocean,’ and that ‘by the time this is over, we could well have one-quarter or one-third of Pakistan under water.'” Because of our burning of fossil fuels to drive cars and heat and cool buildings, the world is heating up. But the Indian Ocean is heating up a third faster than the rest of the world. Very warm waters in the Bay of Bengal are helping create more destructive cyclones and flooding. The air over warming waters contains more moisture than the 20th century average. Warming waters also make the winds that blow over them more erratic, and wayward winds from the Arabian Sea helped push the heavy monsoon rains farther north than they usually extend.
Civil Rights/ Black Liberarion:
The Road to Abolition Amid this galvanizing moment of uprisings and calls to defund the police, Truthout has gathered together some of our most important work on the abolition of policing and prisons. For a decade, we’ve been documenting this work and the ideas behind it. In this feature, we’ve gathered together some recent and past pieces that can help us to envision abolition — both the imagination and the practice of it — and move together toward a more liberated future. . . . Commentators worried the phrase was politically “toxic” and Republicans pounced, conflating anti-racist visions of public safety with vague images of chaos and disruption. Trump even suggested that only he could protect “America’s suburbs” from being overrun with protesters and low-income housing. Meanwhile, most Democrats in office are stridently pro-police. President Joe Biden is setting the tone for his party with repeated calls for Congress to fund the hiring of 100,000 new police officers along with billions of dollars in additional spending.
Plantation This story is an excerpt from Black Suffering: Silent Pain, Hidden Hope (2020) by James Henry Harris, a reverend and Distinguished Professor and Chair of Homiletics and Practical Theology at Virginia Union University. His latest book is N: My Encounter with Racism and the Forbidden Word in an American Classic (2021). The classic in question is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Harris has a different take on Finn’s value as a classic and Twain’s academic exemption from charges of racism. No one can hope to capture fully the Black experience in the United States. It is too vast and multifaceted—and filled with pain. Suffering is the constant, touching the first feet of the Africans on American soil. And suffering is very much present in today’s America, where hard won gains seem threatened every day. I have chosen to approach the African-American experience through vignettes of suffering. Some of the stories are my own, and based on personal experiences. Others were revealed to me. All are authentic, and sadly representative of Black life around us. It is my hope that these small examples and illustrations of loss and distress will enlighten, and thereby help to alleviate some of the pain of suffering, for suffering is the Black experience in this land
Labor:
For the Working Class, Since the 2008, Cash There has Benn No Recovery — Just Depression!:
Since June 2009 Americans have lived in the false reality of a recovering economy. Various fake news and manipulated statistics have been used to create this false impression. However, indicators that really count have not supported the false picture and were ignored. For example, it is normal in a recovering or expanding economy for the labor force participation rate to rise as people enter the workforce to take advantage of the job opportunities. During the decade of the long recovery, from June 2009 through September 2020, the labor force participation rate consistently fell from 65.7 to 62.4 percent. —Paul Craig Roberts, The Diminishing American Economy
Labor Force Participation Rate Labor Force Participation Rate is 62.4%
Shadow Government Statistics Alternate Unemployment The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers. The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment. Aug 2022. Shadow Governmeny Statistics Alternate Unemployment Rose To 24.6% From 24.4% On Top Of U.6 Rising To 6.97% From 6.73%
Economy:
Shadow Government Statitics Daily Update September 2nd to 6th
- Headline Unemployment jumped 0.2%, to 3.7%, as last month’s Pandemic “Recovery” in July 2022 Payroll Employment disappeared, shifting now to August 2022, amidst the regular BLS seasonal-adjustment reporting gimmicks.
- Real Construction Spending continued in deepening monthly, quarterly and annual collapse, an early indication of Third-Quarter 2022 GDP trouble.
- 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.
World:
‘Worst Yet to Come’ as Global Civil Unrest Index Hits All-Time High “Over the coming months, governments across the world are about to get an answer to a burning question: Will protests sparked by socioeconomic pressure transform into broader and more disruptive anti-government action?” The risk of civil unrest is rising in over 100 nations, with the “worst yet to come,” according to an analy-sis published Thursday by the U.K.-based consulting firm Verisk Maplecroft. . . . “With more than 80% of countries around the world seeing inflation above 6%, socioeconomic risks are reaching critical levels,” the analysis explains. “Almost half of all the countries on the CUI are now categorized as high- or extreme-risk, and a large number of states are expected to experience a further deterioration over the next six months.”
Britain’s Energy Catastrophe: Nationalise the Monopolies! Every day brings ever-worsening forecasts of disaster for ordinary people, as bills rise and vulnerable families are pushed into fuel poverty. Whilst millions freeze, energy bosses are raking in mega-profits. Britain’s energy crisis is deepening by the day. Last week, UK gas and electricity regulator Ofgem announced that the domestic price cap is set to jump by 80% from 1 October, raising household bills to an average of £3,549 per year. As a result, millions more are set to be plunged into penury this winter. Even energy bosses and right-wing commentators are describing the situation as a looming ‘catastrophe’. EDF senior executive Philippe Commaret has warned of “a dramatic and catastrophic winter for customers”, predicting that “half of the UK households might be in fuel poverty” by January – defined as spending 10% of income or more on heating and electricity.
Remembering the Sabra Shatila Massacre, Forty Years Later Forty years ago, during the week of September 12, we were working in a Palestine Red Crescent Society facility, Gaza Hospital, in Sabra Shatila camp in West Beirut. As health care workers, we were trying to heal the wounds and repair the mutilated and destroyed bodies of those injured by Israel’s Invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. We had been working there following the evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), mediated by US Middle East envoy Philip Habib. Crucial to the evacuation agreement was the protection of the civilians left behind after the evacuation of the PLO, and Israel’s undertaking not to invade and occupy Beirut. With the guarantee of protection by the multinational peace keeping force, thousands of displaced civilian war victims returned to Sabra Shatila to rebuild their homes and lives.
The U.S.-Russia War for Control of the European Oil Market: Ukraine, What Comes Next? Six months after invading Ukraine, Russia is considering annexing part of the territory it occupies. Western countries, meanwhile, are supplying Ukraine with ever more sophisticated weapons and sending in armies of ‘military advisors’. Russia no longer wants to simply subjugate Ukraine, but to dismember it; the United States no longer wants to contain Russia, but to defeat it. There seems to be nothing to stop this spiral in which each side, increasingly dominated by supporters of war, thinks it has freedom of action because it is betting that its adversary, even with its back to the wall, will never use an option of last resort to extricate itself. But cemeteries are full of the victims of mistaken prognoses like that.
Education, Health, Science, 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
Under Attack: Tenure and Academic Freedom Indiana University President Pamela Whitten responded with confusion when asked on a Bloomington, Ind., public media radio show if she was brought to the Big 10 school to eliminate tenure. “Oh my gosh,” she said, with a laugh. “ Where did that come from?” IU’s first woman president reacted similarly when the questioner refined his query to focus specifically on her three-year tenure as president at Kennesaw State University in Georgia from 2018-2021.
Eugene V. Debs: Labor Day Greeting The workingman is the only man in whose presence I take off my hat. As I salute him, I honor myself. The workingman—and this is the day to write him in capital letters — has given me what I have, made me what I am, and will make me what I hope to be; and I thank him for all, and above all for giving me eyes to see, a heart to feel and a voice to speak for the workingman. Like the rough hewn stone from which the noble statue is chiseled by the hand of man, the Toiler is the rough—hewn bulk from which the perfect Man is being chiseled by the hand of God. All the workingmen of the earth are necessary to the whole Workingman—and he alone will survive of all the human race. Labor Day is a good day to rest the hands and give the brain a chance—to think about what has been, and is, and is yet to be. The way has been long and weary and full of pain, and many have fallen by the wayside, but the Unconquerable Army of Labor is still on the march and as it rests on its arms today and casts a look ahead, it beholds upon the horizon the first glowing rays of the Social Sunrise. Courage, comrades! The struggle must be won, for Peace will only come when she comes hand in hand with Freedom. The right is with the labor movement and the gods of battle are with the Working Class. The Socialist Party and the Trade Union Movement must be one today in celebration of Labor Day and pledge each other their mutual fidelity and support in every battle, economic and political, until the field is won and the Workingman is free. Forget not the past on Labor Day! Think of Homestead! Think of Latimer! Think of Buffalo! Think of Coeur d’Alene! Think of Croton Dam! Think of Chicago! Think of Virden! Think of Pana! Think of Leadville! Think of Cripple Creek! Think of Victor! Think of Telluride! These are some of the bloody battles fought in the past in the war of the Workers for Industrial Freedom and Social Justice. How many and how fierce and bloody shall be the battles of the future?Comrades, this is the day for Workingmen to think of the Class Struggle ad the Ballot—the day for Labor to clasp the hand of Labor and girdle the globe with the International Revolutionary Solidarity of the Working Class. We are all one—all workers of all lands and climes. We know not color, nor creed, nor sex in the Labor Movement. We know only that our hearts throb with the same proletarian stroke, that we are keeping step with our class in the march to the goal and that the solidarity of Labor will vanquish slavery and Humanize the World.