Daily News Digest September 21, 2022
Images of the Day:
Orwell’s Science Fiction Novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is no longer science fiction! Part of the time-tested meaning built into George Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, is its ability to display various ways that human psychology can be manipulated. Throughout the novel, George Orwell uses the fictional authoritarian government to put forth different concepts that cause the psyche to enter an ideal state of influence. One of these concepts, repeated by the government through blasts of speakers established in the city and reiterated by corrupt politicians, reads, “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength!”
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:
George Orwell Explains How “Newspeak” Works, the Official Language of His Totalitarian Dystopia in 1984 As we noted yesterday, and you likely noticed elsewhere, George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 shot to the top of the charts—or the Amazon bestseller list—in the wake of “alternative facts,” the latest Orwellian coinage for bald-faced lying. The ridiculous phrase immediately produced a barrage of parodies, hashtags, and memes; healthy ways of venting rage and disbelief. But maybe there is a danger there too, letting such words sink into the discourse, lest they become what Orwell called “Newspeak.”
An Example of Newspeak: Ukraine War Coverage: After September 11, at first subtly and then not so, one administration after another insisted that there is only one way to understand the world—the American way— and there is no need to understand or consult as to anyone else’s. I am tempted to invite readers to finish this paragraph, but this seems impolite. So: This way of thinking, or refusing any longer to think, is essentially defensive, the refuge of the anxious and uncertain. And if it has not defined the downward spiral in the quality of mainstream media’s post–2001 foreign coverage, this is a very close call. John Pilger, the Australian–British correspondent and filmmaker, remarked after the U.S. cultivated the 2014 coup in Kyiv, “The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember.” Hear, hear, although I imagine John can think of more “most complete” blackouts now, eight years on. — Patrick Lawrence: When Correspondents Came Home, Part 2
Videos of the Day:
The Chris Hedges Report: Ukraine and the Crisis of Media
Margaret Kimberley, Back Agenda Report Executive Editor and Senior Columnist:
Black Politics in San Francisco, Part 2
FBI Surveillance of Aretha Franklin
The U.S. Instigates Conflict in the Horn of Africa
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
Ignorance is Strength!:
‘Heed This Warning’: 2,500+ Book Bans Threaten US Schools and Democracy “More books banned. More districts. More states. More students losing access to literature. ‘More’ is the operative word for this report on school book bans,” says author PEN America. As Banned Books Week began Monday in the United States, a leading advocacy group published an updated report warning of a surge in right-wing efforts to censor and ban titles—many of them related to the struggles of marginalized peoples—in American schools. “More books banned. More districts. More states. More students losing access to literature. ‘More’ is the operative word for this report on school book bans,” begins the update to PEN America’s Banned in the USA: Rising School Book Bans Threaten Free Expression and Students’ First Amendment Rights, which was published in April and covered the first nine months of the 2021-22 scholastic year.
200+ Groups Decry ‘Orwellian’ Industry-Backed Plastic Burning PushThe organizations blasted the American Chemistry Council’s promotion of “advanced recycling” technologies, arguing that “there is nothing advanced about them and nothing gets recycled.” More than 200 civil society groups sent a letter to members of the United States Senate on Monday urging them to eschew sponsorship of potential industry-backed bills that critics say rebrand polluting technologies as “advanced recycling” in a bid to keep burning plastic waste.Banned in the USA As Banned Books Week Celebrates Its 40th Anniversary, It’s Time to Unequivocally Condemn Censorship In her best-selling novel Speak, young adult author Laurie Halse Anderson wrote, “Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.” Since the American Library Association (ALA) and Association of American Publishers helped launch Banned Books Week (BBW) forty years ago, that dysfunctional family of censorship has unfortunately grown larger and more vociferous. Across the United States, this past year has brought a staggering increase in book challenges, bans, and other attacks on the right to read and academic freedom.
Chris Hedges: Strike, Strike, Strike The mounting social inequality is fueling protests around the globe. The global ruling class is determined to prevent these protests from employing the weapon that can bring them down — strikes. The ruling oligarchs are terrified that, for tens of millions of people, the economic dislocation caused by inflation, stagnant wages, austerity, the pandemic and the energy crisis is becoming unendurable. They warn, as Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and NATO Secretary GeneraJens Stoltenberg, have done, about the potential for social unrest, especially as we head towards winter.
The US Response to the World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis: Seize and Privatize On August 10, more than 70 economists, including Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, former economy minister for Argentina Martín Guzmán, and myself, sent a letter to President Biden with a simple ask: return Afghanistan’s central bank assets, deposited at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to Afghanistan’s central bank, Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB). In the letter, we describe how the seizure of the reserves is contributing to mass death and starvation: Seventy percent of Afghan households are unable to meet their basic needs. Some 22.8 million people — over half the population — face acute food insecurity, and 3 million children are at risk of malnutrition. Reports abound of desperate Afghans forced to sell their own organs to afford food for their families. The International Rescue Committee warns: ‘the current humanitarian crisis could lead to more deaths than twenty years of war.’ … Without a functioning central bank, the economy of Afghanistan has, predictably, collapsed. The people of Afghanistan have been made to suffer doubly for a government they did not choose.
‘Quiet Part Out Loud’: GOP Warns Biden Student Debt Cancellation Will Hurt Military Recruitment “The GOP is admitting that the military relies on poor young people to keep the war machine going, and that’s why they oppose canceling student debt.”
Environment: Ecosocialism or Ecocide!:
New Analysis Destroys Fossil Fuel Industry’s Misleading US Job Claims “Their false claims do not add up and cannot be allowed to stall a rapid transition to 100% clean, renewable energy,” says the Food & Water Watch report. A Food & Water Watch report released Monday undermines the fossil fuel industry’s claims about its positive impact on employment, showing that as oil and gas giants ramped up production and raked in record profits at the planet’s expense, jobs have declined. The advocacy group’s fact sheet—titled Oil Profits and Production Grow at the Expense of Jobs, Consumers, and the Environment—comes as scientists continue to call for a swift transition to clean energy and critics around the world accuse the fossil fuel industry of war profiteering.
How Humans Are Making Pandemics Three Times More Likely Habitat loss and global heating are making extreme epidemics like COVID-19 three times more likely, finds a new study. The yearly probability of zoonotic diseases—conditions caused by germs spread from animals to people—“can increase up to threefold in the coming decades,” say the authors of a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
PFAS Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of chemicals that have been used since the 1950s in firefighting foams and many consumer products that includes firefighting foams, stain- and water-resistant fabrics, nonstick cookware and food packaging. PFAS chemicals are highly stable, so when they are released, people can be exposed through air, dust, food, and water resulting in widespread exposure. Many types of PFAS are known to have adverse health effects on humans including increased cholesterol levels, changes in liver enzymes, decreased vaccine response in children, increased risk of high blood pressure in pregnant women, and decreased birth weight. Epidemiologic studies also suggest a link between exposure to certain types of PFAS and increased rates of kidney, prostate, and testicular cancer.
Fury Over ‘Forever Chemicals’ As US States Spread Toxic Sewage Sludge Regulators allow states to continue spreading sludge even as PFAS-tainted substance has ruined livelihoods and poisoned water States are continuing to allow sewage sludge to be spread on cropland as fertilizer and in some cases increasing the amount spread, even as the PFAS-tainted substance has ruined farmers’ livelihoods, poisoned water supplies, contaminated food and put the public’s health at risk. Michigan and Maine are the only two states in the US to widely test sludge, and regulators in each say contamination was found in all tested samples. Still, in recent months, officials in Virginia increased the amount of sludge permitted to be spread on farmland without testing for PFAS, while Alabama regulators have rejected residents’ and environmental groups’ pleas to test sludge for the chemicals.
The Poor Are Being Doubly Hit by Inflation and Policies to Combat Inflation Global food insecurity has doubled since early 2020 amid high inflation, and the Fed is driving up housing costs. For the past several months, the Federal Reserve has used a traditional toolkit to attempt to rein in the high inflation that was unleashed by the pandemic and worsened by Russia’s attack on Ukraine. This traditional model for responding to inflation, hewed to by economists for decades, posits that inflation is triggered by excess demand, and that the way to rein in demand (and thus to put the brakes on inflation) is to raise the cost of borrowing. Hence the rush upward in the interest rate set by the Federal Reserve, and, by extension, the increased cost of borrowing for companies looking to finance new investments and for consumers looking to get mortgages from banks. In the summer of 2021, for a buyer with good credit, a 30-year mortgage could be approved at a 2.75 percent interest rate. Last week, those mortgages headed north of 6 percent. For a family with, say, a $400,000 mortgage, that’s a difference of roughly $14,000 per year. Not surprisingly, millions of people are deferring home purchases. Between the moment when mortgage rates hit their lows last summer and now, the demand for mortgages has declined by nearly a third.
Civil Rights/ Black Liberarion:
Labor:
The New Slavery: More US Employers Are Trapping Workers in a New Form of Indentured Servitude Bosses in industries such as retail, health care and logistics are reverting to an old tactic and trapping people in miserable jobs by threatening to saddle them with debt if they quit. Workers across the United States in fields ranging from nursing to trucking have been discouraged from leaving jobs they hate or can’t afford to keep because employers vow to charge them for training costs if they quit before an arbitrary deadline. The threats are backed by so-called Training Repayment Agreement Provisions (TRAPs) in employment contracts. The practice has been likened by critics to indentured servitude and peonage — formerly common types of debt bondage in which a borrower was bound to perform labor for a creditor.
While Fighting Workers, Railroads Made Over $10 Billion in Stock Buybacks “Our research shows just how far railroad executives will go to funnel record profits to their shareholders—even if that means stagnant wages, inhumane attendance policies, and throwing our supply chain into further turmoil,” said one Groundwork Collaborative analyst.
Economy:
China is the World’s Largest Economy: Get Over It It is common for politicians and pundit types to speculate on when or whether China’s economy will pass the US economy as the world’s largest. The latest episode to cross my path was a column by David Wallace in the New York Times. There is little reason for this sort of speculation. China is already the world’s largest economy, its economy is more than 20 percent larger than the US economy, according to the IMF. Furthermore, it is growing considerably more rapidly (assuming they don’t continue their zero COVID-19 policy forever), so it is projected to be more than a third larger than the US economy by the end of the decade.
Tax the Rich!:World-Renowned Economists Call for ‘Emergency’ Corporate Profit Taxes to Avert Global Recession Governments have a choice, argues a new report: Impose austerity programs that harm the poor, or tax “the multinationals and the super-rich, many of whom have also benefited from the crisis.” With warnings of a global economic meltdown on the rise as central banks jack up interest rates in their efforts to combat runaway inflation, a new report authored by world-renowned economists and advocates calls on governments to enact windfall profit taxes and other “emergency” measures to prevent an entirely avoidable disaster.
Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update
- September 19th to 21st Expectations are for the September Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to attempt to fight inflation, by hiking its targeted Federal Funds Rate by another 0.75%, on Wednesday, the 21st.
- While such would intensify the unfolding recession, it would do little to contain the surging inflation.
- Higher interest rates have helped to trigger and will intensify the deepening, renewed economic recession, as planned by the FOMC, but it will do little to contain the inflation.
- Surging Money Supply, not an overheated economy, is driving prices higher, and the bloated Money Supply has remained intact.
- Recent slowing in the headline CPI inflation primarily reflected reduced gasoline prices. Yet, a rebound in gas prices is likely in the near future, particularly post-Election.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley Have Mysteriously Disappeared from this Week’s Senate and House Banking Hearings There are eight Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBS) in the U.S. They are: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Bank of New York Mellon, Morgan Stanley, State Street and Wells Fargo. These are the banks that pose the greatest risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and are monitored under the Federal Reserve’s stress tests. Five of those eight banks pose the greatest risk to financial stability because together they hold $200.18 trillion (yes trillion) in notional derivatives (face amount) or 86 percent of all derivatives held by all of the nation’s banks, according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency – the federal regulator of national banks. Those banks are: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America.
World:
First a Billionaire. Now a King We expected Charles to get the crown. We didn’t expect him to make a billion-dollar fortune first. . . . In his last princely decade, the New York Times estimates, Charles watched his money managers increase his Duchy’s portfolio value and profits “by about 50 percent.” The Duchy last year brought Charles $28 million in income. His official salary as prince: just $1.1 million. Charles as king now gains his mom’s Duchy of Lancaster, a portfolio worth over $950 million. Throw into the royal family’s overall fortune the queen’s private personal wealth and the “Crown Estate,” a package of holdings that last year delivered to the royals a $99-million “Sovereign Grant,” and you end up with a royal family nest-egg worth somewhere around $28 billion.
Royal Money: Charles III and the Wealth Dimension Once the fixated adoration with the late Queen Elizabeth II starts cooling, the accountants of public welfare and decency will be stunned to realise the costs and wealth associated with the royal institution. Her successor, Charles III, is continuing in that vein, a jarring note of wealth and pomp even as prices rise and the hefty bills for citizens (should we say subjects?), bite. The argument that the monarchy makes money for the British state and others in the Commonwealth starts to seem shallow the more one looks at the accounts and the standing of the institution. But nonetheless, individuals such as Charles Scarlett-Smith, director of Brand Finance Canada, could only see the Queen in terms of beneficial dollars and cents. “When we’re thinking about Queen Elizabeth II’s brand, we really are being synonymous with the royal family and the monarchy.”
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
Underfunding Public Health Is a Decision to Let People Die in the Next Pandemic Our public health system is chronically underfunded, understaffed and in some sites being stripped of its legal powers. With the COVID-19 pandemic still ongoing and monkeypox now deemed a public health emergency in the U.S., we are now officially in the midst of two viral-disease crises. Public health experts know what it takes to get a disease outbreak under control — widespread identification/testing, treatment and prevention. However, systemic issues with the financing and operation of health care in this country have created a public health system that is reactive instead of proactive. As a result, our public health system is chronically underfunded, understaffed and, in some areas, being stripped of its legal powers.