Daily News Digest October 17, 2022
Images of the Day:
U.S. Robber Barron Insider Traders 
Bg Brother is Spying on You!
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:
With national coverage surrounding the story, President Biden had called on Martinez to resign and protests have emerged. Reflecting on this moment, Robert Scheer talks to Eduardo Carreon, a Oaxacan graduate student in psychology at Cal State LA living in Los Angeles. Scheer and Carreon find that this happening serves as an enlightening opportunity to consider the kind of colonial mentality that exists within oppressed communities and how people inhibiting this mentality have the power to bring others down further. They see indigenous people from places like Oaxaca who might be undocumented immigrants as expendable people. Carreon points out that, because they cannot vote, politicians like Martinez don’t care about them despite representing not only their local political interests but overall cultural ones too. “Oaxaca has a rich history and it’s not only Oaxaca, it’s any other Indigenous group throughout Latin America in the world. They have history. There is some sort of rich history that it’s being undermined by colonial forces and they are still being undermined now by politicians,” Carreon says while he emphasizes the need for these kinds of diverse communities. “We need more diverse cultures because that is what is going to help us become better societies,” Carreon said. — Eduardo Carreon: Adopting the Mindset of the Oppressor
Videos of the Day:
Mark Fiore: Diplomacy Dismembered
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
Back to the Streets! — Say NO to U.S. wars! Join one of 50 antiwar actions between October 15th and October 23rd Stop Washington’s war moves toward Russia and China! Stop endless wars: Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Palestine, everywhere! Join us in protest during the week of Oct 15 – 22.
The Nazification of American Society and the Scourge of Violence Violence in the United States surpasses the unthinkable and increasingly resides in the space of apocalyptic rage, manufactured ignorance, and the normalization of a pervasive culture of ritualized barbarism. As civic culture collapses and truth succumbs to conspiracy theories, censorship, and the white washing of history, politics is emptied of democratic values, shared responsibilities, and a viable moral compass. Lawlessness is fueled by a diminishing lack of accountability in the political realm leading to an upsurge in racism, domestic terrorism, mass shootings and increasing threats of violence. Acts of violence erupt in even the most protected and secure spaces extending from schools to supermarkets, engulfing every facet of American life. We now live in a time marked by a politics of displacement, disappearance, erasure, patriotic frenzy, and political stranded as Mississippi River water levels reach critical lowrepression. Human suffering has been turned into a spectacle of racist aggression.
The Scandal of Congressional Stock Trading Multimillionaires pack the halls of congress. That’s because the only people who can afford congressional campaigns are rich. But what you might not know is that once these very wealthy individuals arrive in Washington, they use their committee assignments, and often the insider info those assignments provide, to make even more money – trading stocks. On September 29, Insider named 72 national legislators who violated the law to prevent insider trading and conflicts of interest. But that was not the only recent eye-opening news on lawmakers’ tribulations with er, the law. In the years between 2019 and 2021, the New York Times reporte. d September 13, “more than 3700 trades reported by lawmakers from both parties posed potential conflicts between their public responsibilities and private finances.” That’s a lot of questionable trades. You might even say there should be a law against this.
Sanders Says Biden Admin ‘Must Reject’ Merger of Kroger and Albertsons “At a time when food prices are soaring as a result of corporate greed, it would be an absolute disaster to allow Kroger… to merge with Albertsons,” said the Vermont progressive.
Environment: Ecosocialism or Ecocide!:
A Fast-Emptying Ark: The World Grows Quieter by the Day A vast new study finds there are 70 percent fewer wild animals sharing the earth with us than there were in 1970. I confess, for reasons I can’t fully explain, that when bad things are happening to animals I tend to look away in pain. When bad things are happening to people I try to face those things squarely and do what I can, but there’s something about wildlife—perhaps the way its become implicated in our strange human game without having the slightest agency at all—that just confounds me; some kind of sad and disabling rage fills me. Sometimes, however, the truths are just too overwhelming to avoid.
‘Cancel the Debt’: Climate Protests Disrupt World Bank Summit “The Global South must urgently adapt to the climate emergency so that it can protect its people from a crisis they did nothing to cause,” said Extinction Rebellion. “But it can’t do this while it remains heavily indebted.”
Barges Stranded as Mississippi River Water Levels Reach Critical Low Major shipping delays and backlog of vessels after region experiences lack of rainfall in recent weeks The water in the Mississippi River has dropped so low that barges are getting stuck, leading to expensive dredging and at least one recent traffic jam of more than 2,000 vessels backed up. The Mississippi River Basin produces nearly all – 92% – of US agricultural exports, and 78% of the global exports of feed grains and soybeans. The recent drought has dropped water levels to alarmingly low levels that are causing shipping delays, and seeing the costs of alternative transport, such as rail, rise.
Civil Rights/ Black Liberarion:
Labor:
Economy:
FRED: Household Count in the Top 0.1% (99.9th to 100th Wealth Percentiles)
FRED: Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers
FRED: Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Purchasing Power of the Consumer Dollar 
Raise Corporate Taxes, Not Interest Rates The New York Times recently pointed to car dealerships as an example of a trend that has defined the pandemic era. With high demand and new cars in short supply, dealerships have gotten used to charging higher prices and making record profits at the expense of consumers — and they are unlikely to bring prices down on their own. But car dealerships are far from the only offenders. As inflation soared, CEOs across every sector announced new “pricing strategies” and took to earnings calls to brag about their record profits. And despite the slowing of inflation and the easing of supply chain issues, big corporations are keeping prices high to pad their profits. 
Shadow Government Statitics Daily Update October 14th to 18th
- Real Retail Sales declined by 1.1% (-1.1%) month-to-month and by 0.7% (-0.7%) year-to-year, pulling Third-Quarter 2022 activity into an annualized quarterly contraction of 3.8% (-3.8%), with a quarterly year to-year gain of 0.6%.
- Early October 2022 Consumer Sentiment notched higher but held shy by 40.8% (-40.8%) of recovering its Pre-Pandemic levels.
- The September 2022 Cass Freight Index® declined by 2.9% (-2.9%) month-to-month, both adjusted and unadjusted, but notched higher to a 4.8% unadjusted annual gain.l
Shadow Government Statitics Daily Update October 13th to 14th
- Based on Third-Quarter 2022 CPI-W, the 2022 Social Security Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) headline increase is 8.7% for payments beginning January 2023; per the ShadowStats alternate estimate, it would have been 17.0%, had the CPI-W calculations not been redefined following the CPI Inflation and COLA spikes of 198tion in September 2022, which tends to run lower than the CPI-W over time, was up year-to-to-year in the month (not quarter) by 8.2%, versus 8.3% in August, versus ShadowStats Alternate estimates of 16.4% in September, down from 16.5% August.
- In the third straight month of both headline annual CPI and PPI inflation temporarily depressed by weaker gasoline prices, the aggregate unadjusted year-to-year, annual September 2022 Producer Price Index (PPI) was 8.55%, down from 8.66% in August, while the most meaningful Goods Sector annual inflation declined in parallel to 11.31% from 12.25% in August.
- Where October gasoline prices now are on the rise, upside pressure is mounting anew for inflation in October and likely beyond. The pending Commentary will review and update the inflation circumstance.
Casino Banking: Wall Street Mega Banks Traded More in their Federally-Insured Bank than the Total for their Bank Holding Company When something happens for the first time in history at federally-insured banks, Congress and federal regulators need to pull their heads out of the sand and pay attention. We’re talking about the fact that in the second quarter of this year, trading revenues at federally-insured commercial banks eclipsed the trading revenues at bank holding companies – which typically include subsidiaries where traders actually have licenses to trade. This latest data on what is happening inside the nation’s largest federally-insured banks comes from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), see pages 2 and 3 here. The federally-insured banks generated a total of $10.3 billion in trading revenue in the second quarter versus $10.2 billion for the bank holding companies, or 101 percent of the bank holding company revenues. That’s never happened before according to the data provided by the OCC.
World:
Cuba in the Eye of Washington’s Hurricane Hurricane Ian lashed at western Cuba on September 27, 2022. I waited desperately for a phone call from my friends in Puerto Esperanza, a small fishing village on the northern coast of Pinar del Río. Over a crackling phone line, my friends told me that the hurricane had ripped off the roofs of their houses and had cut their electricity supply. But they were safe. What comes next for them and their recovery from the loss and devastation caused by the hurricane is uncertain under the weight of a U.S. blockade that is now being overseen by U.S. President Joe Biden. Since the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959, the United States has been at odds with the island’s independent path. This led to the start of a blockade on all trading activities between Cuba and the United States in February 1962, and the continued imposition of the blockade has put maximum pressure on the 11 million people who live on the island. Cubans have been resilient while dealing with these sanctions, which is “the longest embargo in modern history.” However, over the past five years, the United States has tightened its blockade by putting in place 243 new sanctions, reversing the process of normalization that began under former U.S. President Barack Obama in 2014 (and culminated in Obama’s visit to Cuba in 2016). Despite Biden’s campaign promise to ensure a more balanced foreign policy toward Cuba, compared to the approach followed by former President Donald Trump, Biden has increased pressure on the country.
The Baby Killers!: On the Death of Rayan Suliman and Palestinian Children’s Very Real Fear of Monsters The truth is, Palestinian children throw stones at Israeli soldiers, neither because of their supposedly inherent hatred of Israelis, nor as purely political acts. They do so because it is their only way of facing their own fears and their daily humiliation.
Italy’s 100 Nuclear Weapons: Nuclear Proliferation and European Hypocrisy The Italian government is betraying its constitution and people by towing the line of the NATO alliance that has always and only served US imperial interests for global hegemony. While Putin’s Russia belligerently and imperialistically rattles its nuclear saber on the one side, the United States and its nuclear armed minions evince projections of nuclear Armageddon on the other, and the celebrated Ukrainian war chic president and US pawn, Zelensky, sucks at the teats of US/NATO weapons dealers and arms manufacturers, while making negotiations with Russia all but impossible.
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
Having a Chronic Illness Without Paid Leave Is Nearly Impossible and Needs to Change Now It’s long past time for our elected officials in Congress to step up and pass a comprehensive federal paid leave policy that provides every single working individual in America with paid family and sick leave.
Teachers Nationwide Want to Reduce Class Sizes for More Reasons Than COVID The push to reduce class sizes is gaining momentum. Can the pandemic be a portal to the end of overcrowded classrooms? Jeffrey M.R. Duncan-Andrade, a professor of Latina/Latino studies and race/resistance studies at San Francisco State University, believes that optimal learning requires meaningful relationships: relationships between peers; relationships between students, school staff and instructors; and relationships between schools and the communities they serve. His latest book, Equality or Equity: Toward a Model of Community-Responsive Education, lays out clear recommendations — mandates — for student success and zeroes in on creating an environment that prioritizes student health over standard markers of achievement like grades and test scores.
New Scientist vs. Reality The recently awarded 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics has been accompanied by much chatter in popular science columns about how the work of the three awarded scientists has proven that there is no such thing as ‘objective reality’, and the world is not real. Even the Nobel Prize committee itself succeeded in misrepresenting the science. Idealist mysticism has made much headway in the sciences, and is expressed most crudely in popular science journals. Perhaps the worst specimen is the once highly regarded New Scientist magazine, as the following article from issue 37 of In Defence of Marxism magazine explains.