Daily News Digest September 19, 2022
Images of the Day:
“Capitalism and Climate Change: The Science and Politics of Global Warming” (eBook)
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!
Quotes of the Day:
A word to the unwise. Torch every book. Char every page. Burn every word to ash. Ideas are incombustible. And therein lies your real fear.” Ellen Hopkins. The government in this society is burning all of the knowledge. The books may be burnt but ideas and your imagination are unretrievable, that can be passed down through generations. The government has the real fear. Censorship is bad and takes away from your imagnation and creativity. — Fahrenheit 451 Censorship Quote
Capitalism and Climate Change: The Science and Politics of Global Warming Foreword by Stephanie McMillan: . . . Capitalism is a global mode of production that is inherently, structurally, inescapably, ever-expanding. Its sole aim is constant capital accumulation. The machine must be fed; consequences are merely collateral damage. It has an inexorable motion of its own that is utterly heedless of human will, desires, or needs (never mind those of other forms of life, who are reduced to mere “resources”). Capital dominates everything; it enchains humanity to the task of its continuance. It reproduces and accumulates through the exploitation of labor in the production of surplus value, crystallized in commodities. And thus it is voracious in its intake of raw materials (forests, wildlife, soil), burns fuel insatiably (coal, oil, natural gas), and then spits its foul wastes into the air and waters, in a cycle of production that is unrelenting. It also happens to be suffocating and cooking us. Professor David Klein is rare in academia, in that he’s able and willing to acknowledge that capitalism and a healthy planet are totally incompatible. This is the real inconvenient truth; saying it out loud can be hard on one’s career. But he has the objectivity and integrity not to turn away from it. Instead, he has assumed the responsibility to help others understand it too, so that they can join the struggle to save the planet. The phrase “save the planet” has been co-opted into a cliché, an insult to our intelligence — a meaningless phrase employed to reduce our agency to recycling aluminum cans and lowering thermostats two degrees. But David takes saving the planet seriously, and he’s determined to figure out what needs to be done to really accomplish that, and bend his efforts accordingly.
Videos of the Day:
The 14 Families and the 12 Banks
David Klein, Ph.D., Discusses The Intersection of Climate Change and Capitalism
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
Big Oil Favors The Iron Heel!: Fossil Fuel Industry Seeks to Expand Free Speech for Corporations And Limit It For Citizens As oil companies push to criminalize dissent, they’re also making the case that climate denialism is protected speech, not fraudulent advertising. Reps. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Katie Porter, D-Calif., probably didn’t plan for their committee hearings to run at the exact same time this week, but the hearings sure were talking to each other. In her Committee on Natural Resources hearing, Porter highlighted the role PR firms play in blocking climate policy. Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah, and his selected witness, Amy Cooke, CEO of the conservative John Locke Foundation, expressed concern that preventing companies and their hired PR firms from spreading misinformation about climate change would have a chilling effect on free speech. Meanwhile, the House Oversight Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, chaired by Raskin, focused on free speech attacks against environmentalists, digging into the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to curb citizens’ speech rights via strategic litigation and laws that criminalize protest. Taken together, the two are a perfect illustration of the industry’s First Amendment strategy: expand free speech for corporations, curb it for citizens.
Is Progress Obsolete? The United States Is Now an ‘Un-Developing’ Country The rankings include the absence of poverty and hunger, good health and education, gender equality, clean air and water, and reduced inequality The United Nations’ latest annual ranking of nations by “sustainable development goals” will come as a shock for many Americans. Not only aren’t we “Number One,” we’re not even close. The top four countries are Scandinavian democracies. The United States ranks forty-first, just below Cuba (that’s right, below our Communist neighbor). Countries that outrank us include Estonia, Croatia, the Slovak Republic, Romania, and Serbia.
The United States of America as a Sacrifice Zone Despite the encouraging policy-making that hit the headlines this summer, America remains a significant sacrifice zone with economic policies that justify their painful impact on the poor and marginalized as necessary for the greater good.
How can Social Democrats ‘Reform The Democratic Partty’, When it is is not ‘Democratic’? Democratic National Committee Edited Bylaws to Let It Overrule Convention The new language requires the smaller committee to ratify any changes that its broader membership at the national convention wants to adopt. During its summer meeting over the weekend, the Democratic National Committee quietly amended its bylaws, giving the narrower body power to override decisions made by its members at its quadrennial convention.
Book-Banning Efforts Rising at Unprecedented Rate, US Libraries Report “We’re truly fearful that at some point we will see a librarian arrested for providing constitutionally protected books on disfavored topics,” said one free speech advocate. Right-wing attempts to ban books are showing no sign of slowing down, according to a report released Friday by the American Library Association—and in fact have reached an unprecedented level, with libraries and bookstores increasingly facing legal threats over the materials on their shelves.
Where Sports and Deportation Meet: ICE Is Removing People on the Same Planes Used to Transport Teams On June 17 a plane painted with the red, white, and blue colors of the six-time Super Bowl champion New England Patriots lifted off from Harlingen, Texas. This plane, however, wasn’t going to deliver the football team to a game. It was crossing the Gulf of Mexico, en route to San Pedro Sula, Honduras on a deportation flight. This would be the plane’s (tail no. N225NE) fourth and final deportation run that week. According to Sports Aviation, a Twitter account that tracks the flights of sports teams, the plane had been used in January to fly the Patriots to a playoff game against the Buffalo Bills. Now, instead of brawny football players enjoying a state-of-the-art entertainment system with spacious seats, the plane was filled with people shackled at their wrists, around their waists, squeezing their ankles. To go to the bathroom, people had to shuffle and navigate the chains and cuffs. They had to hunch down to eat. A plane for a top football team had been converted into an airborne prison.
Environment: Ecosocialism or Ecocide!:
It’s Time to Call It What It Is—A Capitalism-Induced Ecological Crisis Capitalism as an economic system requires constant growth, constant profit, and endless extraction in order to achieve profit We’re in this terrible predicament because of an extractive economy that requires constant environmental destruction in order to fuel economic growth.
Pakistan’s Devastation Is Just a Preview of the Future—and the Biggest Climate Polluters Must Pay Up! The developing world will not forget the leading role that industrialized economies have played in permanently altering the climate and making catastrophic events more likely.
Criticism Intensifies After Big Oil Admits ‘Gaslighting’ Public Over Green Aims Fury as ‘explosive’ files reveal largest oil companies contradicted public statements and wished bedbugs upon critical activists Criticism in the US of the oil industry’s obfuscation over the climate crisis is intensifying after internal documents showed companies attempted to distance themselves from agreed climate goals, admitted “gaslighting” the public over purported efforts to go green, and even wished critical activists be infested by bedbugs.
Civil Rights/ Black Liberarion:
Big Brother is Watching You! Documents Show LAPD Monitoring of Community Meeting on . . . LAPD Social Media Monitoring An email alert flagged the meeting as a “Planned Protest” that could potentially warrant a police response. Back in May, I flew to California to talk to a community organizing group about the Los Angeles Police Department’s use of social media monitoring tools. The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition invited me because the Brennan Center had obtained over 10,000 pages of documents about the LAPD’s use of social media — and with them, an unprecedented window into the department’s surveillance of activists and communities of color. The event was held at the Robinson S.P.A.C.E, a community-run outfit that provides free space for progressive local organizations in Los Angeles.
Detroit Cops Want $7 Million in Covid Relief Money for Surveillance Microphones The company behind the mics, ShotSpotter, is going all out to guide police stations across the country on how to use relief money for the controversial technology. Detroit’s city counciL will soon vote on whether to spend millions in federal cash meant to ease the economic pains of the coronavirus pandemic on ShotSpotter, a controversial surveillance technology critics say is invasive, discriminatory, and fundamentally broken.
Privatization Threat Remains, Advocates Warn, After Mississippi Lifts Jackson Boil-Water Notice “The city remains under threat of a state-imposed privatization,” said one campaigner. “The system remains one climate change-fueled storm away from breaking down again.” One day after officials from the Mississippi State Department of Health lifted the weekslong boil-water notice for Jackson, environmental justice advocates warned Friday that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves’ threat of privatization remains and called for adequate public investment in the city’s infrastructure to enable the provision of safe drinking water in perpetuity.
Boyah J. Farah: A Somali Boy’s Escape From Somalia’s Harrowing Genocide Leads Him To His Dream Paradise—and the Brutality of American Racism . . . An international humanitarian group found them a home in the Boston area, where Farah attended high school and college. Such a life should provide an upbeat memoir of enlightened human liberation. But instead, as described in his just-published book, “America Made me a Black Man: A Memoir,” Farah discovered in the country of his dreams an alternative version of oppression: being Black in America.
The Post-Roe Horror is a Bipartisan Production Every day or so we learn about new horrors inflicted on women and girls by the vicious war on abortion rights that has been dramatically escalated in the wake of the United States Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision. There’s nothing mysterious about the Donald Trump-captive Republi-fascist Party’s reprehensible role spearheading this sadistic sexist assault. The attack has been spearheaded by that party’s elected officials and judicial appointees from the preposterously 6-3 right wing Court, which overrode super-majority public support for retaining Roe v. Wade (the 1973 Court decision that established abortion as a constitutional right), red state legislators, governors, and judges who are banning and severely restricting female reproductive choice across the nation.
Economy:
AIG Was Brought Down by Derivatives in 2008. It Just Spun Off a Company Whose Prospectus Mentions Derivatives 371 Times Yesterday, mainstream media was touting that the largest Initial Public Offering (IPO) of the year, Corebridge Financial, had just finished its first day of trading. The IPO was priced at $21 and closed at $20.73 (ticker: CRBG), not an illustrious start. Corebridge Financial is the life insurance and annuity business of the giant insurer, AIG. In 2008, AIG required a $180 billion bailout from the U.S. government because of its derivatives and stock loan deals with the big trading houses on Wall Street — many of the same ones that are now underwriting this IPO.
World:
Britain: Anti-Monarchy Activists Arrested – Defend the Right to Protest! The last week has seen a spate of arrests against anti-monarchy protestors, as the establishment cynically utilises the Queen’s death to silence the left. But no amount of repression can hold back the rising tide of class struggle. Last Sunday in Edinburgh, for example, at a ceremony for the accession of King Charles III, a young woman involved with Revolutionary Students and other student activist groups at Edinburgh University was arrested for holding up a placard that said ‘abolish the monarchy’. Police argued that this constituted a ‘breach of the peace’ – the same charge given to a man who was later arrested in Edinburgh for heckling Prince Andrew as he passed. Similarly, Socialist Appeal comrades running a street stall in Nottingham on Sunday were instructed by police not to use anti-monarchy slogans. Officers told the comrades that these could ‘cause offence’ and constitute a breach of the peace. This was despite the comrades and their stall receiving a positive reception from local members of the public.
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
Bernie Sanders: On the Shambles of the American Health Care System and the Need for Medicare-for-All I understand that there is a lot that is going on in this world today. We’re worried about climate change. We’re worried about the terrible war in Ukraine. We’re worried about inflation and the fact that wages are not keeping up with prices. We’re worried about massive income and wealth inequality and the increased concentration of ownership that we see in our country – among many other things. But the American people remain deeply concerned about an issue that by definition touches every single one of us – and that is our collapsing and dysfunctional healthcare system.