Daily News Digest October 20, 2022

Daily News Digest Archives

Images of the Day:

Pax Americana

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:

Rosa Parks has become a symbol of courage for our time and for all time. All over the world, she ranks with Nelson Mandela and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the pantheon of 20th-century heroes and sheroes who have expanded our notion of what it means to be a human being.     But in becoming an icon, Parks has been turned into a shadow of her real self. Few people are aware of her lifetime of struggle before and after that fateful day in 1955, when her refusal to give up her seat on an Alabama bus triggered the 13-month-long boycott that launched the modern civil rights movement.     How many people know that, unlike Gandhi and King, she refused to rule out the righteous use of force? Not only did she admire Malcolm X, she flew down to Monroe, North Carolina, just a few years ago for the funeral of Robert Williams, the outspoken advocate of armed self-defense by the black community. — Book Review – Rosa Parks by Douglas Brinkley

Videos of the Day: 

“The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks”: New Film Explores Untold Radical Life of Civil Rights IconUnited 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.

Something of epochal importance happened in Vienna, where the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, now known as OPEC–Plus with the inclusion of the Russian Federation, convened recently for its first in-person session since 2020. You would not know of this development if you rely solely on the reports carried in our corporate-owned media.     The world just took a significant turn into the 21st century. Let us stay abreast of it, leaving those who refuse to see this to their own devices.     President Biden, apparently not intelligent enough to understand the emergent new era and indifferent to the interests and aspirations of others, quickly made as big a mess of things as could be made. Last week he threatened Saudi Arabia, which co-chairs OPEC–Plus with the Russian Federation, with “consequences” for what transpired in Vienna. This is what imperiums do when their primacy is threatened—they encourage the very currents in history they are determined to disrupt.  — Patrick Lawrence: The Non-West Coalesces

Pax Americana: Biden’s National Security Strategy Is a Defense of US Domination, Not Democracy The Biden administration just released its new National Security Strategy. It is designed to restore and enforce Washington’s domination over global capitalism and the international state system against pretenders to its throne as the imperial hegemon.      As the document puts it, the world order is at an “inflection point;” “the post-Cold War era is definitely over, and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next.” This is a new predicament for the U.S. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington resembled a modern-day Rome with unrivaled geopolitical, economic, and military power to enforce free trade globalization and its attendant inequalities within and between nation states.     Over the last two decades, however, the U.S. has suffered relative decline and now confronts imperial rivals like China and Russia as well as regional ones like Iran among others. Beijing and Moscow are developing their own strategies to pursue their respective imperialist and local assertions of power, most dramatically demonstrated by Beijing’s threat to annex Taiwan and Russia’s horrific colonial war on Ukraine.

Beyond the Politics of Despair: an Interview With Marianne Williamson As Americans live through varying degrees of angst during this final month before the mid-term elections, who should burst onto the scene but the unconventional political and spiritual activist Marianne Williamson offering words of love, hope, and defiance.     Williamson, you may recall, ran as a progressive Democrat for the 2020 Presidency. Drawing huge crowds during the primary season and selling millions of her books, she declared then that she had the best credentials to guide America through an “era of anger, anxiety and political chaos.” She called for a social revolution, a renovation of a “sociopathic economic system focused on short-term profit maximization.” She eventually dropped out of that 2020 race, having failed to meet certain fundraising targets and enduring media slights, and endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders.

Environment: Ecosocialism or Ecocide!:

When Bodies Start Stacking Up From Climate Change-Related Disasters, Will These Monsters Be Held To Account?’

New Jersey Sues 5 Oil Giants, Industry Lobby for Climate Fraud “We will work tirelessly to make sure these companies pay every last dollar for the harm they’ve caused,” said state AG Matthew Platkin. “If you lie to the public to protect your profits, we will hold you accountable.” New Jersey on Tuesday sued five oil and gas companies and a leading fossil fuel lobby group for knowingly lying to the public about the existence of climate change and the role their products play in exacerbating human-caused global heating.    The lawsuit, filed in New Jersey Superior Court in Mercer County, targets ExxonMobil Corporation, Shell Oil Company, Chevron Corporation, BP, ConocoPhillips, and the American Petroleum Institute (API).

 United Nation’s Tribunal Recommends Worldwide Ban on Hydraulic Fracturing The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal is recommending a worldwide ban on hydraulic fracturing, the extreme oil and gas extraction technique known as  ‘fracking.’ The Tribunal found that the materials, and infrastructure of fracking inherently and necessarily violate human rights. The specific rights violated include the rights to life, to water, to full information and participation, and especially the rights of indigenous people, women and children.      “I hope the United States heeds the warnings of the UN Tribunal and puts a stop to any and all fracking related activities immediately given these findings,” said Lois Gibbs founder of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice/ People’s Action Institute (CHEJ)

‘Badasses of the Mountains’: Goats Clash With Sheep as Key US Glaciers Melt Climate crisis may explain fights as disappearing ice fuels interspecies competition – with goats nearly always winning In one corner, there is the agile climber with steak knife-like horns. In the other is America’s largest wild sheep. They are locked in significantly one-sided combat in the mountains of the US west, scientists have found, in a battle over resources uncovered by the region’s vanishing glaciers.    In study sites across a 1,500-mile span of the Rocky Mountains, scientists have documented mountain goats and bighorn sheep competing over mineral deposits among the rocks, at elevations of up to 14,000ft.

  Civil Rights/ Black Liberarion:

Black Agenda Report 

Labor:

Economy:

China: Xi’s Third Term – Part Two: Property, Debt and Common Prosperity  In part one of my analysis of China’s economic future, I dealt with the claims that China would slow towards stagnation because its investment rate was too high, the working population was falling fast and the economy needed to become like mature Western capitalist economies based on consumption-led growth.  I argued that the Western capitalist model was hardly great shakes, given its regular and recurring crises and the much lower levels of consumption growth.  Anyway, in an economy, consumption does not lead investment and national output.  On the contrary, it is investment that leads in capitalist economies just as much as in China.     The reason that Western analysts are so sceptical of the Chinese model is that they are seeped in a different economic model for growth.  They are convinced that China can only be ‘successful’ (like the economies of the G7!) if its economy depends on profitable investment by privately-owned companies in a ‘free market’.  And yet the evidence of the last 40 and even 70 years is that a state-led, planning economic model that is China’s has been way more successful than its ‘market economy’ peers such as India, Brazil or Russia -and even the G7.

Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update – October 14th to 18th

  • September 2022 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

This Time Will Be Different: One or More Corporations Will Blow Up from Derivatives along with Global Banks Today, we will be asking the Senate Banking Committee, its Chair, Senator Sherrod Brown, and one of its most knowledgeable members, Senator Elizabeth Warren, to call an emergency hearing and subpoena the testimony of two brilliant researchers for the Office of Financial Research. Those researchers are Andrew Ellul and Dasol Kim. The men have done nothing wrong. In fact, they have done something courageous. They have effectively blown the whistle on how global Wall Street banks have, once again, endangered the stability of the U.S. financial system through their opaque and dangerous use of over-the-counter derivatives.

World:

‘Devastating’: Right-Wing Swedish Government Shutters Environment Ministry “It is impossible to describe more clearly how little this government values the environment and the climate,” said the leader of the Swedish Greens. In one of its first moves after taking power Tuesday, Sweden’s newly elected right-wing government scrapped the country’s environment ministry, drawing outrage from opposition lawmakers who say the step threatens to undermine the nation’s chances of meeting its climate targets.

Iran: Death to the Oppressors – Be They Shah or Supreme Leader It is over a month now since the outbreak of the youth uprising in Iran, sparked by the regime’s murder of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini. With near constant clashes between security forces and youth in every major city, in addition to waves of bazaar strikes and a series of industrial strikes, the situation has the potential of turning into a revolutionary mass movement. Since last week, a campaign for a general strike has been spreading, along with calls for the formation of revolutionary resistance committees.     This revolutionary movement has received massive support from workers and youth across the world, especially amongst the Iranian diaspora. Meanwhile, in many western countries, bourgeois politicians, in cynical self-interest, have joined solidarity protests, cut their hair in feigned support for Iranian women, and made hypocritical speeches about human rights. The exiled Pahlavi dynasty, overthrown by the 1979 revolution, jumped at this as an opportunity to present themselves as the spokespersons for the Iranian people.

 The Other Russia-West War: Why Some African Countries are Abandoning Paris, Joining Moscow . . . A few years ago, the discussion regarding the geopolitical shifts in Africa was not exactly concerned with France and Russia per se. It focused mostly on China’s growing economic role and political partnerships on the African continent. For example, Beijing’s decision to establish its first overseas military base in Djibouti in 2017 signaled China’s major geopolitical move, by translating its economic influence in the region to political influence, backed by military presence.     China remains committed to its Africa strategy. Beijing has been Africa’s largest trading partner for 12 years, consecutively, with total bilateral trade between China and Africa, in 2021, reaching $254.3 billion, according to recent data released by the General Administration of Customs of China.

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  

COVID Has Become Indefinite. We Need New Practices to Keep Each Other Safe. Some community organizers are using consent-based practices to build a safer world as the state abandons public health. Nearly three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, many people are still struggling with how to ask the people around them — their families, coworkers, fellow organizers and other community members — to respect their needs related to coronavirus safety. As guidelines and social situations have shifted away from mandates, these conversations have become more necessary but not necessarily more frequent.

The ideas of V. Gordon Childe: In Defence of Historical Materialism      Vere Gordon Childe was a lifelong Marxist, who dedicated himself to applying all the insights of Marx and Engels to the most cutting-edge research of his day. His ideas proved the enduring strength of the materialist conception of history, despite endless distortions and attacks.     Childe was born in Sydney in 1892, at a time when the class struggle in Australia was going from a spark to a blazing bushfire. As waves of strikes and lockouts went down to defeat, a layer of the trade union leadership and left intellectuals coalesced into the Australian Labour Party (ALP), been the political arm of the militant labour movement was, however, almost immediately characterised by parliamentary timidity and caution. Later in his life Childe would write a book, How Labour Governs (1923), describing the widening gulf between parliamentary reformism and the labour movement. which immediately headed into parliament.      What should have  been the political arm of the militant labour movement was, however, almost immediately characterised by parliamentary timidity and caution. Later in his life Childe would write a book, How Labour Governs (1923), describing the widening gulf between parliamentary reformism and the labour movement.