Daily News Digest October 4, 2022
Images of the Day:
The Pentagon Doesn’t Know Where Its Money Goes 
Latuff 
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:
From:Patrick Lawrence: The West—Technocrats, Incompetents, Ideologues:
- Last Sunday Italian voters went to the polls and backed a populist party of extreme-right persuasions, Fratelli Italia, Brothers of Italy, by a wide margin. When the Italian Senate names party leader Giorgia Meloni premier at the end of October, as is widely expected, Italy will be the first founding member of the European Union to be governed by a vigorously nationalist coalition.
- Britain’s financial markets—stocks, bonds, currency—swooned into something close to chaos this week in response to Liz Truss’s plans to reduce taxes by ₤45 billion, $48 billion, with no provision to fund the cuts and no apparent thought to the inflationary effects of this policy. With the pound hitting record lows against the dollar and U.K. pension funds caught with their pants around their knees, the Bank of England was forced to intervene Wednesday to protect the economy against the prime minister’s self-evident recklessness.
- Following referendums in eastern and southern Ukraine this week, Moscow announced Thursday that the four regions where they were held will be formally reintegrated into the Russian Federation by way of treaties to be signed at the Kremlin Friday. That makes four new facts on the ground for the Kyiv regime and its Western supporters, for which Washington ought to answer.
Videos of the Day:
Reporters used to report, now there’s virtually no line between media and the national security state. Veteran international journalist Patrick Lawrence on this show notes the big change occurred 9/11; since then we have been subject to an information monoculture. Instead of reporting, the story is fit into an official frame, never mind reality. Listen to the keeping democracy alive podcast.
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
As the Republicracts Annually Pump of Hundreds of Billion Dollars into the Military Budget: The Pentagon Has Never Passed An Audit. Some Senators ‘Want’ to Change That. Lies and Dishonor Plague America’s War Machine . . . “The Pentagon and the military industrial complex have been plagued by a massive amount of waste, fraud and financial mismanagement for decades. That is absolutely unacceptable,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who co-sponsored the bill with Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, along with Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Mike Lee, R-Utah..
Lies and Dishonor Plague America’s War Machine Despite the lies, the U.S. war machine has suffered no consequences for their mendacity and malfeasance. As a military professor for six years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in the 1990s, I often walked past the honor code prominently displayed for all cadets to see. Its message was simple and clear: they were not to tolerate lying, cheating, stealing, or similar dishonorable acts. Yet that’s exactly what the U.S. military and many of America’s senior civilian leaders have been doing from the Vietnam War era to this very day: lying and cooking the books, while cheating and stealing from the American people. And yet the most remarkable thing may be that no honor code turns out to apply to them, so they’ve suffered no consequences for their mendacity and malfeasance.
Environment: Ecosocialism or Ecocide!:
Before leaving the island for Florida, Ian strengthened to Category 4, with winds of up to 250km/h, and also hit other western Cuban provinces with strong winds that toppled trees on a large scale in the capital Havana. The impact of the storm, described by many as the worst in 20 years, left the entire island without power as of Tuesday night. Cuba, a frequent victim of tropical storms of all kinds, has an effective civil defence system to prevent damage, and has been recognised by the UN as “a model in hurricane risk management.” According to a statistical study by the Cuban Institute of Meteorology, a US citizen is 10 times more likely to die when affected by a hurricane than a Cuban. On this occasion, 50,000 people were evacuated before the arrival of the storm, mainly in Pinar del Río. Thanks to these measures, the loss of life was minimal, two deaths have been reported so far, although the material damage was very extensive, particularly in Pinar del Río, affecting homes, commercial premises, companies, the tobacco harvest and others. Brigades from all over the country travelled to the province to collaborate in debris removal and recovery task. — Hurricane Ian Batters Cuba: Blackout and Protests
I watched a Netflix program about the concept of infinity. It is difficult to grasp it, but as I watched the program, it struck me that given our utter insignificance in terms of our place in a vast and perhaps infinite, expanding universe, it is remarkable what a mess we have made of the earth. Rather than marveling at the fact that we are alive on a planet that sustains life and acting accordingly to make sure that the planet stays alive and keeps us living, we have done exactly the opposite. We live to destroy it seems. What intelligent creatures, ones who can see exactly what is happening, namely the eventual extinction of our species, would continue to act in ways that guarantee our own demise? It really is a form of insanity. — Michael Yates
The Top 1% of Emitters Caused Almost a Quarter of Global Emissions Since 1990 Just 1% of the world’s population was responsible for almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions over 1990-2019, new research finds. The study, published in Nature Sustainability, highlights the inequality in peoples’ greenhouse gas footprints — a cornerstone of the climate justice movement.
Destructive Hurricanes Fuel Calls for Biden to Declare Climate Emergency “Mother Nature is not waiting for the president or Congress to declare a climate emergency. She’s showing us in real-time here in the United States—with wildfires, floods, heatwaves, hurricanes, and drought.” With Puerto Rico and Florida still reeling from a pair of hurricanes—one of which made landfall again Friday as a Category 1 storm in South Carolina—activists across the United States have renewed calls for President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency.
‘Future of Clean Water on the Line’ as Supreme Court Takes Up Challenge to Bedrock Law “If the Supreme Court excludes Clean Water Act protections from major wetlands and other waters,” one climate group warned, “the damage to water quality, flood control, and wildlife habit would be severe. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday began hearing oral arguments in a case that corporate polluters are hoping will take an axe to the Clean Water Act, a bedrock environmental law that protects the nation’s streams and wetlands from industry exploitation. The long-brewing case in question, Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, was brought by Idaho couple Chantell and Michael Sackett in partnership with the right-wing Pacific Legal Foundation—and with the backing of industry groups eager to curtail the federal government’s authority to regulate and preserve the nation’s waterways.
Hurricane Ian’s Devastation Is a Crime Scene—And Big Oil Is Holding the Bloodied Knife Stunningly, while climate change threatens to render the earth no longer viable for human life, the role of oil executives in this epic tragedy remains out of the spotlight.
The End of a Way Of Life? Ranchers Struggle to Survive the South-West’s Megadrought Farmers are increasingly being forced to sell off parts of herds and seeing cows perish as drought conditions worsen.
Civil Rights/ Black Liberarion:
Labor:
Trotsky in his essay, Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay, wrote that: The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.” He observed this trend when he stated : In the United States, the Department of Labor with its leftist bureaucracy has as its task the subordination of the trade union movement to the democratic state and it must be said that this task has up to now been solved with some success. In today’s world. Every union has adopted and implemented the slogan of a “partnership with the boss.” (When I was working the worst epithet that one could say about a union official was that he/she “was in bed with the boss.” Now it is their slogan! And they are doing their best to stay in the boss’s bed as the boss threatens to toss them out to cut costs.) — The Fall of the Trade Union Movement (2010 Update) Elections: The Default of The Trade Union Movement
What Dean Baker Leaves out is the 1%’s Government Enforces Capitalism’s Pauperization of Humanity!: Government Policy, Not the Market, Spurred the Rise in Inequality It is a complete article of faith in intellectual circles that the market is responsible for the rise in inequality that we have seen in the United States and elsewhere over the last half-century. Intellectual types literally cannot even consider the alternative that inequality was the result of government policies, not the natural workings of the market. The standard line is that technology and globalization were responsible for the increasing gap in income between people with college, especially advanced, degrees and non-college-educated workers. This belief that market forces drove inequality and not policy is apparently central to the identity of its beneficiaries, who determine what appears in major news outlets.
Edictorial: Trickle Up and Trickle Down . . . The ‘prosperity’ of the last 5 decades is attributed to the success of the ‘tickle down economic theory’. But it is, in fact, due t0 the working class’s wages trickling down. The only ‘trickle down’, since the wage-price freeze, has been the average weekly earnings of the 99%! The graft below, found at Shadow Government Statistics, demonstrate this fact: Shadow Government Statistics: Real Average Weekly Earnings (Benchmark Revised) Production and Nonsupervisory Employees Deflated by CPI-W versus ShadowStats-Alternate (1990-Base) 1965 to September 2017, Seasonally-Adjusted [ShadowStats, BLS]
Economy:
Martin Wolf: Truss’s Growth Plan is Nothing But a Magic Potion Hoping that reality will adapt to your desires is folly: Britain needs stable and credible policies, not zealotry Liz Truss has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. So, too, has Kwasi Kwarteng. A week of unnecessary and damaging turmoil has proved this. But behind it is an even bigger danger. The only sort of leader more dangerous than the rogue the UK used to have is the zealot it has now. The dominant characteristic of zealots is their conviction that reality must adapt to their desires, rather than the other way around. If this attitude to life is adopted by an individual, it can do great damage to those close to them. In political leaders, the result may be a disaster for the country. The irony is that for these people “the market” is god and economics 101 their religion. Yet actual markets have rebuffed them, as investors fled sterling and gilts, causing such mayhem that the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee(opens a new window) was driven to intervene, in an attempt to rescue the government and an ill-regulated pensions industry from their follies.
Trickle Down Economics The UK government’s economic policies under new PM Liz Truss have caused a stir among, not only leftists, but also among mainstream economists. The new government says the solution to the stagnation and failure of British capitalist production is to cut taxation on the rich and on big business. The extra income flowing to them will then be available to boost investment and spending that can deliver economic growth. This is a reversion to a very old idea in neoclassical economics: trickle-down economics. The term “trickle-down” originated as a joke by humorist Will Rogers which he used to criticize econom
ic policies that favoured the wealthy or privileged while being framed as good for the average citizen.
Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update October 2nd to 3rd
- August 2022 Construction Spending.] September Consumer Sentiment notched back minimally from its Preliminary reading, still holding shy by 42.0% (-42.0%) of recovering pre-Pandemic levels.
- Yesterday’s [September 27th] GDP Annual Benchmark Revisions showed the Pandemic’s economic collapse to have been a bit shallower than previously indicated, but the First- and Second-Quarter 2022 consecutive Real GDP, GDI and GNP quarterly contractions all held in place, with minimal change in magnitude, still showing the onset of what now should gain formal recognition as a “new” Recession.
- Separately, August 2022 Real Retail Sales, continued to generate an early signal of a Third-Quarter 2022 contraction, which followed a monthly contraction in August Industrial Production on top of continuing downside revisions to prior months. Indeed, a renewed downturn is in play, despite intensifying official obfuscation that already is underway.
Here’s the Chart of the Global Bank Causing Panic in Markets This Morning The Swiss global bank, Credit Suisse, which is a derivatives counterparty to major Wall Street banks and U.S. insurers, raised alarm bells in markets on Friday and is raising more anxiety this morning. Its 5-year credit default swap (CDS), a measurement of its risk of defaulting on its debt, jumped to 250 basis points on Friday and traded as high as 350 basis points in early morning trade today. The big move in the CDS on Credit Suisse is further impacting the price of its common stock. The shares closed on Friday in New York at $3.92, just pennies away from its all-time low, then dropped another 11 percent in early morning trading in Europe today.
World:
Britannia Unhinged: UK’s Return to Trickle Down Economy is Suicide The value of the British pound is already collapsing. And the strikes and protests proliferate. “The Queen’s final act of service to the nation was to selflessly buy the economy one last fortnight,” said one tweet when all four wheels finally came off the British economy. The Queen’s death and funeral took up the first twelve days of Liz Truss’s tenure, so the new prime minister’s work of destruction could not get properly underway until last Friday. Then, however, Truss and her faithful sidekick Kwasi Kwarteng, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister), got to work with amazing speed.
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