Daily News Digest October 26, 20222
Images of the Day:
Since World War I, ‘the war to end all wars’, there have been perpetual wars for perpetual peace, this Laura Gray’s cartoon from the front page of The Militant August 18, 1945, Under the Banner Headline: “There Is No Peace”, is Still True for Today’s World!
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:
And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: Repress-ion works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on. ― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
The main takeaway from Truss’s downfall is that tackling inflation by rewarding the rich is a fool’s errand. Fashioning herself after Margaret Thatcher, the godmother of conservative capitalism, Truss had hoped to join the ranks of former prime ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron as a champion of “trickle-down” policies. A central idea favored by Thatcherites—one that may sound familiar to Americans—is that when ordinary people are struggling, leaders must ensure the rich get richer so that the crumbs of their excesses will trickle down to the poor. Going hand in hand with this is the aggressive deregulation of industries to free them from the fetters of any protective measures that could impact profit margins. — What the Failure of Liz Truss’s Economic Agenda in the UK Can Teach the U.S.
Videos of the Day:
Scott Ritter – NATO Becoming More Fractured as the Ukraine Russia War Goes On.
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
We Need a New Paradigm to Halt the Unprecedented Growth of Electronic Monitoring Electronic monitoring has gone far beyond ankle bands. Let’s challenge the meteoric expansion of this form of policing. After more than four decades in the shadows, electronic monitors have captured the hearts and minds of law enforcement. In Harris County, Texas, the ranks of those being tracked with electronic devices while awaiting trial skyrocketed from 27 people in 2019 to nearly 4,000 in 2021. Authorities from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) increased the number of migrants tracked nationally by the SmartLINK cellphone app from over 86,000 in December 2020 to more than 247,000 in September of this year. And in an unprecedented move, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) released 46,000 people to home confinement from March 2020 to July 2022, most of them forced to wear electronic monitors.
Don’t Call Them Election Deniers. Call Them Election Liars Words matter and the media bear a special responsibility to get them right. When they don’t, democracy itself can become the ultimate victim. Thomas Jefferson warned that an informed citizenry would be crucial to the survival of democracy. In pursuit of that mission today, words matter and the media bear a special responsibility to get them right. When they don’t, democracy itself can become the ultimate victim. That’s happening now.
In ‘Affront to Justice,’ Thomas Shields Graham From Subpoena in Georgia Election Case “Clarence Thomas should not be ruling on any 2020 election-related case given his wife’s behavior. Period. Full stop.” ‘Progressives’ on Monday repeated calls for a federal investiga-tion into U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, right-wing activist Ginni Thomas, after the judge unilaterally granted a request to shield Sen. Lindsey Graham from a subpoena regarding the 2020 election. . . .Thomas has faced calls to recuse himself from all cases related to the 2020 election because his wife contacted White House officials and Republican lawmakers in at least two other states following the election, asking them to help reverse Trump’s loss.
After the Media Monopoly has Legitimatized Racism: These Supreme Court Cases Could Spell Final Doom for US Democracy If the conservative court upholds attempted violations of the Voting Rights Act, the US can drop pretences to justice. In recent years, the United States Supreme Court has dutifully laboured to erode the protections guaranteed under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a civil rights era milestone that aimed to safeguard minority voters from racial discrimination. Now, six decades after the law’s passage, the country’s highest judicial body will decide whether to drop some of the few pretences to justice and equality in US electoral democracy that remain.
Environment: Ecosocialism or Ecocide!:
Green Washing Forests for Logging Plunder: Under the protection of the National Park Service, Queets Fir survived the great chainsaw massacre that took out almost every other massive tree in the Pacific Northwest during the last century. Today, the few remaining old-growth trees in the region are protected under various state and federal regulations. An “old-growth” tree is often defined as older than 175 years of age, but the big Douglas fir behind Anderson’s house won’t be considered old-growth for another two decades. The Washington Department of Natural Resources, the state agency that owns the tree along with thousands of acres of “mature” conifers and hardwoods throughout the state, is eager to cash trees like this one out while it still legally can. To that effect, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed into law legislation that few Washingtonians seem to be aware of. Adopted two years ago, House Bill 2528 declares logging forests to be a “solution” to the climate crisis. Since becoming governor in 2013, Inslee has doubled down on his bet favoring shifting carbon from forests to wood products, as witnessed by how Washington’s state-owned forests are managed under his leadership. The state’s logging operations have clearcut thousands of acres of mature forests annually over the last decade, with another 3,600 scheduled for logging in 2023. — Washington State Has Quietly Made Logging a Part of Its Climate Plan
The Impact of Climate Change on Our Health and Health Systems . . . How does climate change affect physical and mental health?
- Physical health.The toll of extreme climate events on our physical health has been well documented. Worldwide, more than 5 million deaths each year are linked to abnormally hot and cold temperatures.
- Air pollution produced by wildfires is associated with respiratory and cardiovascular illness. In 2019 alone, fine particulate matter in the atmosphere resulted in at least 8 million deaths globally. Extremely hot weather and heat waves can lead to heat stroke and exhaustionand worsen chronic health conditions. As temperatures rise, research shows that approximately 5,600 heat-related deaths occurred each year from 1997–2006 in 297 counties where more than 60 percent of Americans live. The June 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest led to 600 excess deaths in Washington and Oregon in one week alone.
- Floods, the most common natural disaster, cause injuries and drowningsand spread waterborne disease. In 2016, floods — excluding the landslides often caused by them — affected more than 74 million people globally.
- The list goes on. More frequent and more intense hurricanes are creating widespread death, destruction, and displacement. Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, contributed to the loss of nearly 2,000 livesand displaced some 1.5 million reside
‘Beyond Parody’: New Climate-Focused Semafor Newsletter Sponsored by… Chevron “Today’s edition features a message from the fossil fuel company, one of the world’s largest producers of carbon emissions, claiming it is ‘working toward a lower carbon future,'” noted one journalist.
Greenpeace to Rishi Sunak: Tax Fossil Fuel Profits and Lower Energy Bills Now “Delay has cost lives. Chaos costs lives. And it will cost more lives this winter and every winter,” campaigners say. “No one benefits except the oil and gas profiteers.” Hours after lawmakers from the ruling Conservative Party voted to make Rishi Sunak the United Kingdom’s third prime minister this year, more than 30 climate and energy justice activists occupied the lobby of Parliament to demand that the government fund home insulation and renewable power generation through a more robust tax on oil and gas corporations’ windfall profits
Civil Rights/ Black Liberarion:
Labor:
Right to Strike Next?: Corporate Lobbyists Persuaded Supreme Court to Throw Out Pro-Worker Ruling The Supreme Court has proved, once again, eager to do corporations’ bidding by attacking workers’ rights this month. Act-ing at the request of an influential corporate lobbying group, the Supreme Court ordered a lower court on October 17 to revisit a labor dispute that had previously been settled in the workers’ favor. In an unsigned opinion, justices said the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals must throw out an earlier ruling in favor of workers attempting to sue their boss, the pizza delivery giant Domino’s. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce had called on the Supreme Court to make the decision in an amicus, or “friend of the court” briefing
Economy:
A Former Goldman Sachs/Hedge Fund Guy Is the New U.K. Prime Minister The newly installed U.K. Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, (the third PM in seven weeks) has scrubbed his Goldman Sachs and hedge fund career from his LinkedIn profile and from his official government bio. But, unfortunately for Sunak, those careers have been assiduously chronicled in countless newspaper articles for more than a decade – and not in a good way. Sunak worked as a junior analyst at Goldman Sachs from 2001 to 2004, where part of his research involved railways. He left Goldman to obtain his MBA at Stanford University, following which he joined TCI hedge fund in 2006 as a partner and worked there until 2009, when he left to co-found the hedge fund, Theleme Partners with Patrick Degorce. Sunak worked at Theleme Partners until 2014, when he moved into conservative politics in the U.K. That’s a total of 13 years involvement in financial markets that Sunak wants to obliterate from his work history. Those 13 years in finance include a number of controversial events. Chief among them was Sunak’s direct involvement in activism against the board of the U.S. rail freight operator, CSX. The TCI hedge fund had secretly acquired a large stake in CSX along with another hedge fund, 3G Capital Partners, through the purchase of shares as well as total return equity swaps, a form of opaque derivatives that can be used to disguise a large share stake. (That same type of derivative was used by Archegos Capital Management last year to disguise its giant stake in ViacomCBS and other companies, blow itself up, and leave mega global banks nursing margin loan losses of more than $10 billion.)
World:
Michael Roberts Blog: Rishi Sunak is to be the new (yet another within weeks) prime minister of Britain, without a vote or even a campaign statement or speech. Sunak will be the first Goldman Sachs PM and the richest man ever to be a British PM. And the first British Indian PM to hold a green card for the US. Big business and finance get their man – British government bond prices rose. Sunak and his wife, Akshata Murty, are sitting on a combined fortune of about £730m – roughly double the estimated £300m-£350m wealth of King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort. Sunak, who earlier this year became the first frontline politician to ever be included in the Sunday Times Rich List of the UK’s wealthiest people, will also almost rival the King in terms of numbers of official residences. Sunak owns a portfolio of four properties spread across the world and valued at more than £15m. Sunak, his wife and two daughters, Krishna and Anoushka, spend most of the week at their five-bedroom mews house in Kensington, west London, which is estimated by estate agents to be worth more than £7m.
Britain’s New PM Is as Wealthy as the King — and as Distant From the People Why is Rishi Sunak so despised in the Tory Party and how did he nonetheless carry the day?
What Rishi Sunak’s Banking Background Can Tell Us About His Premiership Markets have reacted well to Sunak’s win, but he might not be able to give the City everything it wants Much has been made of the fact that Rishi Sunak will be the first British prime minister of Asian descent. Rather less remarked upon is that he will be the first prime minister of Goldman Sachs heritage. When speculating on what a Sunak government will be like, many in the City will take comfort from his years of experience working in investment banking and hedge funds. This will surely make him more favorably disposed towards an industry that has felt neglected in Downing Street since the financial crisis. More importantly, it will provide reassurance at a time when the country faces severe economic and financial challenges.
Health,Education, 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