Daily News Digest October 28, 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:
Capitalism “has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes,” King wrote in his 1952 letter to Scott. He would echo the sentiment 15 years later in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?: “Capitalism has often left a gap of superfluous wealth and abject poverty [and] has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few.” Speaking at a staff retreat of the SCLC in 1966, King said that “something is wrong … with capitalism” and “there must be a better distribution of wealth” in the country. “Maybe,” he suggested, “America must move toward a democratic socialism. . . . ”Speaking at a staff retreat of the SCLC in 1966, King said that “something is wrong … with capitalism” and “there must be a better distribution of wealth” in the country. “Maybe,” he suggested, “America must move toward a democratic socialism.” — The Forgotten Socialist History of Martin Luther King
Videos of the Day:
Phyllis Bennis on Progressive Dems Retracting Letter Urging Diplomacy to End Ukraine War
Silent Approval: Biden Hosts Israeli President But Says Nothing About Deadly Israeli Crackdown in Occupied West Bank
Children’s Hospitals See Surge in RSV as Experts Warn of Winter “Tripledemic” of Respiratory Illness
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
Glenn Greenwald:The Regime — and Our New Live, Prime-Time Rumble Program Consortium Imposing the Growing Censorship We are launching a new live, one-hour, prime-time news broadcast. Armed with cable-sized budgets, it will be part of a network that Russell Brand has already debuted. The rapid escalation of online censorship, and increasingly offline censorship, cannot be overstated. The silencing tactic that has most commonly provoked attention and debate is the banning of particular posts or individuals by specific social media platforms. But the censorship regime that has been developed, and which is now rapidly escalating, extends far beyond those relatively limited punishments. — The Consortium of State and Corporate Power — There has been some reporting — by me and others — on the new and utterly fraudulent “disinformation” industry. This newly minted, self-proclaimed expertise, grounded in little more than crude political ideology, claims the right to officially decree what is “true” and “false” for purposes of, among other things, justifying state and corporate censorship of what its “experts” decree to be “disinformation.” The industry is funded by a consortium of a small handful of neoliberal billionaires (George Soros and Pierre Omidyar) along with U.S., British and EU intelligence agencies. These government-and-billionaire-funded “anti-disinformation” groups often masquerade under benign-sounding names: The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, Bellingcat, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. They are designed to cast the appearance of apolitical scholarship, but their only real purpose is to provide a justifying framework to stigmatize, repress and censor any thoughts, views and ideas that dissent from neoliberal establishment orthodoxy. It exists, in other words, to make censorship and other forms of repression appear scientific rather than ideological.
Fifteen Seconds Till Armageddon “When militarism is addressed as a psychosocial disease, the absurd irrationality of its symptoms is clearly exposed.” These words are from a 1992 essay by N. Arther Coulter published in a journal called Medicine and War. Who would have guessed? They’re as relevant now as they were three decades ago. God bless Armageddon. As war wreaks hell in Ukraine — and the threat of a nuclear confrontation between superpowers continues to intensify — NATO is in the process of prepping for the end of the world. It’s an annual two-week training event called Steadfast Noon — a nuclear practice run that gives European flight crews a chance to practice loading and dropping “non-strategic” nuclear bombs. Russia is expected to conduct its own annual nuclear drill, known as Grom (that is, Thunder), soon as well.
Scott Ritter: Russia’s ‘Dirty Bomb’ Scare Russia appears to be legitimately concerned about the possibility of Ukraine building and using a “dirty bomb,” so much so that it has taken the unprecedented step of reaching out to multiple senior Western defense authorities. In the span of a few hours on Sunday, the senior-most Russian defense authorities — Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and General Gennady Gerasimov — called their counterparts in the U.S., U.K., France, and Turkey, with the same message — Ukraine is preparing to detonate a so-called “dirty bomb”— high explosive-wrapped radiological material, designed to contaminate large areas with deadly radioactive isotopes. Russia is not only concerned about the immediate impact of Ukraine detonating such a devise in terms of the harm that would be done to people and the environment, but also about the potential for such an event to be used by Ukraine’s western allies to directly intervene militarily in the ongoing conflict, similar to what occurred in Syria when allegations about the use of Sarin nerve agent by the Syrian government against civilians were used by the U.S., U.K., and France to justify an attack on Syrian military and infrastructure targets. (It turned out that the allegations of Sarin use were false; the jury is still out about the use of commercial chlorine as a weapon.)
Crossing the Border into Ukraine Mihail Kogălniceanu, Romania — “The U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division has been deployed to Europe for the first time in almost 80 years amid soaring tension between Russia and the American-led NATO military alliance. The light infantry unit, nicknamed the “Screaming Eagles,” is trained to deploy on any battlefield in the world within hours, ready to fight.” – CBS News, October 21, 2022. We live in a time when Opinion Pieces write themselves, when mainstream news—without realizing it—captures all the irony, duplicity, and insanity of the U.S. War Industry in its self-glorified march toward World War. Writers don’t need to warn of the worst because the worst is already happening.
Bary Sheppard: Antidemocratic Structures Unique to the United States The North American British colonies and then the United States carried out genocidal suppression of the Native Americans, and similar suppressions of native peoples occurred in other settler-colonial countries. Preface: As Noam Chomsky stated in his interview on American History and Democracy: . . . If you go back to the record of the Constitutional Convention, which took place in 1787, almost immediately after the end of the war, you see that they are already moving in another direction. James Madison — who was the main framer, and one of the Founding Fathers who was most libertarian — makes it very clear that the new constitutional system must be designed so as to ensure that the government will, in his words, “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” and bar the way to anything like agrarian reform. The determination was made that America could not allow functioning democracy, since people would use their political power to attack the wealth of the minority of the opulent. Therefore, Madison argues, the country should be placed in the hands of the wealthier set of men, as he put it.
The Facade of Democracy! 
Environment: Ecosocialism or Ecocide!:
The Climate Crisis is Killing Us.”: Healthy Human Future Still Possible If World Ditches Fossil Fuels: Lancet Study “Immediate action could still save the lives of millions, with a rapid shift to clean energy and energy efficiency,” says the lead author of a new report. While a continuation of the fossil fuel-dominated status quo threatens to “lock in a fatally warmer future,” policymakers can still secure a “thriving future” for humanity if they pursue a “health-centered” response that confronts the oil and gas industry responsible for shortening and endangering millions of lives around the globe. That’s according to a major report published Tuesday in the Lancet, a leading source of peer-reviewed research, which states that “the just transition to a healthy future can no longer be delayed.”
‘It’s so Blatant’: Oil Companies are Pumping Money into State Races Following Newsom’s Push to Tax Profits After Gavin Newsom vowed to tax their windfall profits, oil companies have spent millions to convince voters to elect their chosen candidates to the Legislature. After Gov. Gavin Newsom vowed to tax their windfall profits, oil companies have spent millions to convince voters to elect their chosen candidates to the Legislature, hoping to stack the deck in their favor.
European Oil Giants Report ‘Obscene’ Profits as Millions Face Deadly Energy Crisis “The likes of Shell are treating families like cash machines,” said one United Kingdom union leader. European oil giants Shell and Total reported massive profits Thursday as sky-high energy prices fuel a devastating cost-of-living crisis across the continent, with families struggling to afford heat and electricity as the winter months approach. Shell, one of the biggest oil companies in the world, posted $9.5 billion in global third-quarter profits—more than double the $4.2 billion it reported during the same period last year. The United Kingdom-based corporation also announced plans to reward shareholders by buying back $4 billion worth of its stock and boosting its dividend by 15%.
Deadliest Summer for Heat-Related Deaths in Arizona’s Biggest County Maricopa county’s 359 heat-associated fatalities this year outpace 339 deaths confirmed in 2021, figures show This summer was the deadliest on record for heat-related deathsin Arizona’s largest county, with public health statistics this week confirming 359 such deaths just days before the end of the six-month heat season.
Civil Rights/ Black Liberarion:
The Cruel and Dangerous Path of Beating Down the Poor in America If the U.S. is to redeem itself with a vision of justice, it’s time for a deep and humble acknowledgment of the breadth and depth of poverty in the richest country in human history. Ours is an ever more unequal world, even if that subject is ever less attended to in this country. In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here?, Reverend Martin Luther King wrote tellingly, “The prescription for the cure rests with the accurate diagnosis of the disease. A people who began a national life inspired by a vision of a society of brotherhood can redeem itself. But redemption can come only through a humble acknowledgment of guilt and an honest knowledge of self.”
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist: Biden Orders Progressives to Denounce Themselves on Ukraine Progressives made a mealy mouthed appeal to Biden to engage in talks regarding Ukraine. He slapped them down and they in turn slapped themselves. “But as legislators responsible for the expenditure of tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in military assistance in the conflict, we believe such involvement in this war also creates a responsibility for the United States to seriously explore all possible avenues, including direct engagement with Russia, to reduce harm and support Ukraine in achieving a peaceful settlement.” October 24, 2022 letter from congressional progressives to Joe Biden. Congressional “progressives” are cowards and charlatans. They may actually believe in some of what they claim to espouse but at the end of the day they are more opportunistic than anything else. They have carved out a niche for themselves in certain parts of the country where voters are in fact progressive and want to see their political ideology put into practice. But good luck ever seeing that when the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus makes a fool of herself and her members when they didn’t have the courage of their very slim convictions.
Labor:
Mike Davis: The Barren Marriage of American Labour and The Democratic Party On the eve of the New Deal’s inauguration in the winter of 1933 the auto industry in Detroit was stunned by an energetic and well-planned walkout at the Briggs Auto plant.footnote Following three and a half years of nearly catastrophic unemployment and paralyzed inaction by the American Federation of Labor, the Briggs strike signaled the revival of industrial militancy. This ‘Lexington and Concord of the auto rebellion,’ as it was later typed, was fought for two demands that would be central in most early New Deal strikes: company recognition of rank and file controlled shop committees and the limitation of the authority of foremen and line supervisors.
Will There be a National Strike at UPS? Talk of a national strike at United Parcel Service (UPS) is a welcome change from the two decades of retreat under the Teamsters’ former General President James P. Hoffa. There has only been one national strike in UPS’s history, in 1997, under the leadership of the union’s first democratically elected leader, Ron Carey. A national strike is long overdue. Rank-and-file UPS Teamsters have paid a catastrophic price for a compliant leadership–Teamsters leader James Hoffa’s ratification in October in 2018 of a contract that members voted down.
Economy:
The Fed Likes yo Tout Its Independence. So Why Are Big Banks Lobbying It? Unlike Trump, Biden vowed to “respect the Fed’s independence,” even as bank lobbyists continue to swarm it. The Federal Reserve, far from the independent institution it often touts itself as, is under intense pressure at all times from massive commercial banks and other financial institutions advocating for favorable regulations, according to federal lobbying disclosures reviewed by The Intercept, as well as interviews with former Fed and other finance employees. The Federal Reserve has come under scrutiny in recent months for its aggressive interest rate hikes designed to, as Chair Jerome Powell said, “get wages down and then get inflation down.” The Fed’s own research has warned that its aggressive policy mirrors a similar one that caused a “severe recession” under Paul Volcker in the 1980s, as The Intercept recently reported. Even the United Nations, which recently warned that the Fed’s rate hikes risk “inflicting worse damage than the financial crisis in 2008 and the COVID-19 shock in 2020.” Yet President Joe Biden, unlike Donald Trump, has declined to publicly criticize the Fed, saying after it began hiking rates earlier this year that he would “respect the Fed’s independence.”
Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update October 26th to 27th
- Pending subscriber-only ShadowStats Economic Commentary No. 1461will provide a broad review of current fiscal, economic and monetary circumstances, detailing how current Federal Reserve and Federal Government policies are untenable, exacerbating — not resolving — already unstable, soaring inflation and re-intensifying broad economic weakness.
- Despite regular, extreme monthly instability in New Home Sales, September 2022 closed out the fifth consecutive quarter of year-to-year decline, the second-consecutive quarterly decline in this Census Bureau Series, while the early estimate of the September 2022 Trade Deficit in Goods widened. Where the impact of those numbers is negative for the GDP, the Atlanta Fed’s highly accurate GDPNow Model estimate for tomorrow’s initial, annualized Real Third-Quarter 2022 GDP growth just was upped to 3.1%, from 2.9%, based on surging, more-than-offsetting government spending. That is against a consensus estimate of 2.3% (Wall Street Journal). The ShadowStats outlook remains solidly for a deepening economic downturn, which will be discussed in tomorrow’s GDP assessment and reviewed in Commentary No. 1461.
- In context of upside benchmark revisions to the current more-liquid Money Supply data, September 2022 Money Supply “Basic M1” (Currency plus Demand Deposits) notched minimally off its new 123.3% [previously 122.1%] August record-high gain, holding at 121.6% above its Pre-Pandemic Peak, still reflecting a 52-year peak in extreme flight to liquidity — no inflation relief is in sight, so far.
Fed’s Powell Calls U.S. Economy “Robust” as Personal Savings Rate Collapses to Same Level as in Financial Crisis of 2008 “This is a strong, robust economy. People have savings on their balance sheet from the period when they couldn’t spend and where they were getting government transfers. There’s still very significant savings out there, although not as much at the lower end of the income spectrum — but still, some savings out there to support growth. The states are very flush with cash, so there’s good reason to think that this will continue to be a reasonably strong economy.” (See the top of page 15 of the official transcript from the Fed.). Powell’s statement stands in stark contrast to the numbers coming out of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). According to BEA data, the Personal Savings Rate in the U.S. now stands at 3.5 percent, exactly where it stood in August of 2008 – in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
World:
The Rise of Fascism in Italy: 100 Years Since the March on Rome A century has passed since the Italian capitalist class handed power to Benito Mussolini’s fascists. Below we present a series of articles by Sinistra Classe Rivoluzione, the Italian section of the IMT, on the events leading up to Mussolini’s infamous ‘March on Rome’, the first three of which are compiled below (and the fourth will soon be available in Italian on their website). It is important we understand the lessons of fascism’s rise to power in Italy, which was facilitated by the betrayals and mistakes of the workers’ leaders.
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
Them and Us: Hunger, Highflyers and HIMARS Capitalism is incapable of offering a decent and dignified existence to workers and the poor, yet provides unimaginable luxury for the elite. While billions struggle to find enough to eat, the billionaires dine like royalty. The necessities of life are increasingly unattainable, yet capitalist governments plough billions into instruments of death. To quote Marx, these are the economics of the madhouse. n recent weeks, we have described how rising inflation, brutal energy bills and a deepening housing crisis are bearing down on the working class in one country after another. And yet the rich, untroubled by a few extra coins spent here and there on food and gas, have been celebrating the end of pandemic restrictions with a spot of retail therapy.
Cornavirus Pandemic:
A New Immunity-Evading Virus Variant Looms. Here’s how to fight it. Get ready: Another covid wave is on the horizon because of a new immunity-evading subvariant, BQ.1, and its offshoots. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, based in part on models, that BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 now account for nearly 17 percent of infections in the United States, up from zero a few weeks ago. The prevalent BA.5 variant is starting to fade. Especially at risk are the unvaccinated and those who have not gotten a shot of the new boosters. Right now, the pandemic in the United States is in a lull, and overall levels remain relatively low. There are 260,808 new reported cases a week and 2,566 weekly deaths, the CDC said, partially based on modeling. Covid-19 has been one of the leading causes of death in the United States, but the numbers are far smaller than during the omicron surge last winter.
As of 10/ 24/22 USA Covid Total: Total Cases: 99,141,254, Total New Cases 16,364, and Total Deaths:1,093,338.
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