Daily News Digest November 8, 2022
Images of the Day:
There Can Be No Climate Justice Without Trade Justice! Ahead of the COP27, Fairtrade ngo once again urges governments for concrete action… but time is running out, and those who produce the least carbon are the most affected by the impact of climate change. 
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:
From To a Contemporary Bunkshooter by Carl Sandburg: You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it up all right with them by giving them mansions in the skies after they’re dead and the worms have eaten ’em. You tell $6 a week department store girls all they need is Jesus; you take a steel trust wop, dead without having lived, gray and shrunken at forty years of age, and you tell him to look at Jesus on the cross and he’ll be all right. You tell poor people they don’t need any more money on pay day and even if it’s fierce to be out of a job, Jesus’ll fix that up all right, all right—all they gotta do is take Jesus the way you say. I’m telling you Jesus wouldn’t stand for the stuff you’re handing out. Jesus played it different. The bankers and lawyers of Jerusalem got their sluggers and murderers to go after Jesus just because Jesus wouldn’t play their game. He didn’t sit in with the big thieves. I don’t want a lot of gab from a bunkshooter in my religion. I won’t take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth and never cherishes any memory except the face of the woman on the American silver dollar. I ask you to come through and show me where you’re pouring out the blood of your life. I’ve been to this suburb of Jerusalem they call Golgotha, where they nailed Him, and I know if the story is straight it was real blood ran from His hands and the nail-holes, and it was real blood spurted in red drops where the spear of the Roman soldier rammed in between the ribs of this Jesus of Nazareth!
Videos of the Day:
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
The Pandemic is Here to Stay!: United States Covid Total New Clases Last 7 Days 211,129
Patrick Lawrence: War s Presentatiom As the U.S. midterm elections approach, the gap between Western media’s depiction of the war in Ukraine and the actual war waged on the ground appears to be widening more dramatically. We are urged at every turn to dismiss everything Vladimir Putin says as upside down to the truth. Those of us who keep our heads, while all about us others are losing theirs and blaming it on us, risk dismissal when we take the Russian president seriously. Never mind. It is time simply to dismiss those who dismiss. In his long interviews with Oliver Stone five years ago, Putin observed that it is impossible to work with the Americans because everything is held hostage by their election cycles. So true. Too bad so many among us are not capable of listening to the Russian leader on this point and learning from it something about how our post-democratic system malfunctions. Domestic politics — what plays in Peoria and all that — determines foreign policy. This was Putin’s point. And when electoral politics determines foreign policy, foreign policy becomes presentation, which is to say unserious, because all the good people of Peoria ever get from Washington pols are unserious presentations of events and policies that have little to do with reality.
Patrick Lawrence: Why Is The New York Times Still Hyping ‘Russiagate’? Veteran foreign correspondent Patrick Lawrence takes issue with this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Ihave a perverse taste for books and newspaper pieces titled “The Untold Story of Whatever It Is That Hasn’t Been Told.” The cliché on the front cover or in the headline is among my favorites. And then what follows: It has been told before, or it is not worth telling, or—often the case—it is conjured nonsense, a mass of dots that don’t connect, which is why nobody previously thought to tell it. . . . And now I have read “The Untold Story of ‘Russiagate’ and the Road to War in Ukraine.” Jim Rutenberg wrote it and The New York Times published Sunday, November 6. This is the tale, the tallest I have read in years, of how Russia’s long-alleged and long-disproven interference in the 2016 election in Donald Trump’s behalf was but a prelude to Russia’s intervention, with the connivance of Trump and his adjutants, in Ukraine. “Putin’s American adventure,” Rutenberg writes, “might be best understood as advance payment for a geopolitical grail closer to home: a vassal Ukrainian state.”
America’s 9/11 Wars Created the Foot Soldiers of Far-Right Violence at Home A relatively small number of veterans are having an outsized impact on white supremacist violence. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan radicalized a generation of veterans, many of whom face trials for sedition and other crimes. Nathan Bedford Forrest Was One Of The Most Aggressive Generals Of His Generation, And After His Military service ended in a bitter fashion, he went home to Tennessee and found a new way to fight. A defeated general in the Confederate army, Forrest joined the Ku Klux Klan and was named its inaugural “grand wizard.” Forrest was in the first wave of American veterans who turned to domestic terror once they returned home. It also happened after World War I and II, after the Korean and Vietnam wars — and it is happening after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sedition trial now taking place in Washington, D.C., features five defendants accused of trying to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021, and four are veterans, including Stewart Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers militia. In December, another sedition trial is set for five members of the Proud Boys militia — four of whom served in the military.
The Militarism and Mechanics of the National Security State In the past several weeks, we have gained excellent insight into the processes of the National Security State that finds the White House, the Congress, and the mainstream media cooperating to justify additional defense spending and strategic weaponry. Following the attacks of 9/11, we have seen the steady militarization of our national security policies, including the use of the military to secure foreign policy goals and the militarization of our intelligence community.
Horrifying “Small” Talk about Nuclear Weapons Gideon Rachman reported October 31 in a Financial Times column that, “… senior U.S. officials point out that the smallest tactical nuclear weapons might kill hundreds of people, rather than thousands — and devastate and irradiate just a few square miles.” Rachman’s use of the phrases “might kill hundreds” and “just a few square miles” is outrageous in its callous trivialization of what would occur in the kill zone. The crude, “small” atomic bomb the United States used to smash and burn Hiroshima was a 15-kiloton device. This “small” atom bomb incinerated five square miles and “…turned into powder and ash the flesh and bones of 140,000 men, women and children,” as historian Howard Zinn noted in his essay The Bomb. Likewise, in Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, Robert Lifton and Greg Mitchell reported that the bomb’s detonation resulted in “killing 100,000 people immediately, and fatally injuring at least 50,000 others.”
US Says Zelenskiy Risks Allies’ ‘Ukraine Fatigue’ If He Rejects Russia Talks – Report Ukraine’s position with allies is wearing thin as fears grow over economic effect of protracted war, officials tell newspaper. US officials have reportedly warned the Ukrainian government in private that it needs to signal an openness to negotiating with Russia. Officials in Washington have warned that “Ukraine fatigue” among allies could worsen if Kyiv continues to be closed to negotiations, the Washington Post reported. US officials told the paper that Ukraine’s position on negotiations with Russia is wearing thin among allies who are worried about the economic effects of a protracted war.
‘Americans Aren’t Serfs’: House Democrats Propose End to Wall Street Rent-Gouging “Low- and middle-income families in my district and across the country are being pushed out because of profiteering and unfair practices by large corporate landlords,” says Rep. Ro Khanna. To help address the nation’s housing crisis while at the same time confronting Wall Street greed, three California members of Congress on Saturday touted new legislation to target rent-gouging in the U.S. by private equity firms and investment giants who have gobbled up huge numbers of single-family home and residential units in the years since the 2008 financial crash.
Environment: Ecosocialism or Ecocide!:
The following speech by Fidel Castro expressed the urgency of the currny threat, of ecocide. in his speech to the Earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro in 1992. It would be appropriate for COP27 meeting!
He opened with these words: An important biological species is in danger of disappearing due to the fast and progressive destruction of its natural living conditions: mankind. We have now become aware of this problem when it is almost too late to stop it. It is necessary to point out that consumer societies are fundamentally responsible for the brutal destruction of the environment. They arose from the old colonial powers and from imperialist policies which in turn engendered the backwardness and poverty, which today afflicts the vast majority of mankind. With only 20 percent of the world’s population, these societies consume two-thirds of the metals and three-fourths of the energy produced in the world. They have poisoned the seas and rivers, polluted the air, weakened and punctured the ozone layer, saturated the atmosphere with gases which are changing weather conditions with a catastrophic effect we are already beginning to experience. The forests are disappearing. The deserts are expanding. Every year thousands of millions of tons of fertile soil end up in the sea. Numerous species are becoming extinct. Population pressures and poverty trigger frenzied efforts to survive even when it is at the expense of the environment. It is not possible to blame the Third World countries for this. Yesterday, they were colonies; today, they are nations exploited and pillaged by an unjust international economic order. The solution cannot be to prevent the development of those who need it most. The reality is that anything that nowadays contributes to underdevelopment and poverty constitutes a flagrant violation of ecology. Tens of millions of men, women, and children die every year in the Third World as a result of this, more than in each of the two world wars. Unequal terms of trade, protectionism, and foreign debt assault the ecology and promote the destruction of the environment. If we want to save mankind from this self-destruction, we have to better distribute the wealth and technologies available in the world. Less luxury and less waste by a few countries is needed so there is less poverty and less hunger on a large part of the Earth. We do not need any more transferring to the Third World of lifestyles and consumption habits that ruin the environment. Let human life become more rational. Let us implement a just international economic order. Let us use all the science necessary for pollution-free, sustained development. Let us pay the ecological debt, and not the foreign debt. Let hunger disappear, and not mankind. Now that the alleged threat of communism has disappeared and there are no longer any more excuses for cold wars, arms races, and military spending, what is blocking the immediate use of these resources to promote the development of the Third World and fight the threat of the ecological destruction of the planet? Let selfishness end. Let hegemonies end. Let insensitivity, irresponsibility, and deceit end. Tomorrow it will be Tomorrow will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago!
Another Cop Out? COP 27 started over the weekend. COP stands for the conference of the parties under the UNFCCC. Under the 1992 UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC), every country is treaty-bound to “avoid dangerous climate change” and find ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally in an equitable way. At the 2015 COP in Paris, countries committed to holding global temperature rises to “well below” 2C above pre-industrial levels, while “pursuing efforts” to limit heating to 1.5C. Those goals are supposedly legally binding and enshrined in the treaty. However, to meet those goals, countries also agreed on non-binding national targets to cut – or in the case of developing countries to curb – the growth of greenhouse gas emissions in the near term, by 2030 in most cases. Those targets are known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs). As the international COP 27 climate change conference opened in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt, the UN released a new report finding that the last eight years were the hottest ever recorded and the chances of keeping the world temperature from rising more than the international target limit 1.5C compared to pre-industrial times was ‘barely possible’.
Points if not Return as the world warms. thee Earth systems are chand,. Could further warming make them soib out of control? In 2019 an international team of scientists published a commentary in the celebrated science journal Nature, sounding the alarm of a planet in crisis — and calling for transformative change.“We are in a state of planetary emergency,” they wrote, departing from the usual sterility of scientific writing. “The stability and resilience of our planet is in peril.” Yes, they were writing about climate change, but of a particular kind: climate tipping points, elements of the Earth system in which small changes in global temperature can kick off reinforcing loops that ‘tip’ a system into a profoundly different state, accelerating heat waves, permafrost thaw, and coastal flooding — and, in some cases, fueling more warming. The planet has already warmed by roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the Industrial Revolution, and if humans keep flooding the atmosphere with greenhouse gases at the same rate, we’re on track to increase that to 2.7 to 3.1 degrees C (4.9 to 5.6 degrees F) by the end of the century. So those small changes are getting bigger — increasing the likelihood of triggering those reinforcing loops, known as positive feedbacks. (For example, warming increases the frequency of wildfires, which in turn increases the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from burning trees, which leads to an increase in global temperature, which means, you guessed it, even more wildfires.)
WMO Report: The Hottest Eight Years on Record Sea level rise accelerates, European glacier melt shatters records, extreme weather causes devastation The past eight years are on track to be the eight warmest on record, fueled by ever-rising greenhouse gas concentrations and accumulated heat. Extreme heatwaves, drought and devastating flooding have affected millions and cost billions this year, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s provisional State of the Global Climate in 2022 report. The tell-tale signs and impacts of climate change are becoming more dramatic. The rate of sea level rise has doubled since 1993. It has risen by nearly 10 mm since January 2020 to a new record high this year. The past two and a half years alone account for 10 percent of the overall rise in sea level since satellite measurements started nearly 30 years ago.
‘Drop Fossil Fuels,’ Over 400 Scientists Tell PR Firm Handling UN Climate Talks Hill+Knowlton, a pioneer in disinformation tactics used by tobacco and oil companies, still represents fossil fuel clients while leading communications for the upcoming COP27 Ahead of the COP27 UN climate summit, hundreds of scientists are calling on the PR firm in charge of the event’s communications, Hill+Knowlton, to cut ties with its fossil fuel industry clients, which include major oil companies Aramco, ExxonMobil, and Shell as well as an industry coalition called the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative. “These clients have not taken the fundamental steps necessary to address the climate emergency and sharply rein in fossil fuels,” states an open letter to Hill+Knowlton signed by over 420 scientists. “Instead, they have used Hill+Knowlton and other PR agencies to spin, delay, and mislead, in order to continue expanding fossil fuel production and thereby increasing heat-trapping emissions.”
Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:
Abortion Bans Are a Direct Threat to Economic Security Abortion and the economy are inextricably linked. Why are so few Democratic candidates making the connection? In the leadup to the midterm elections, abortion rights and the economy have consistently polled as two of the top issues among voters. . In the latest Gallup poll, they finished first and second: Forty-nine percent of registered voters said that the economy was “extremely important” to them, while 42 percent said the same of abortion. After Kansas voters resoundingly rejected an anti-abortion ballot measure in August, many Democrats hoped that energy might carry them to a victory — or at least help them stave off a total defeat — in the midterms. However, according to a recent poll from NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist, Republican voters are more enthusiastic about the midterms than Democrats. Could it be that the post-Dobbs momentum to treat the midterms as a referendum on abortion has faded, and that the economy has eclipsed abortion as a motivating issue for voters? Media coverage certainly suggests so, and if that’s the case, Democrats are in trouble: Another poll from ABC News and Ipsos found that 36 percent of Americans trust Republicans to better handle their economic concerns, compared to just 24 percent who trust Democrats.
Labor:
Support the Railworkers! — Form Rail Worker Suppport Committees!: Rail Unions Got Pressured Into a Bad Deal. Now Workers Are Threatening to Strike. If one railroad union strikes, 11 more could respect the picket line and shut down the nation’s railway infrastructure. Gabe, a veteran train conductor on the West Coast, thinks the contract proposal that his union hammered out with rail carriers last month is insulting — condemning tens of thousands of freight train operators to brutal, exhausting schedules with barebones crews — but he also knows that if his union votes it down, potentially pushing the union toward a strike, even mass industrial action would likely end with the same deal. Nonetheless, he said, “Even if this was going to get stuffed down our throats, I want to go on strike and make them bleed a little money and make them hurt for a little bit. You know what I mean? If we have to, at least I could give ’em a kiss.”
Economy:
Germany’s Position In America’s New World Order Germany and other NATO countries have been told to impose trade and investment sanctions upon themselves that will outlast today’s proxy war in Ukraine. U.S. President Biden and his State Department spokesmen have explained that Ukraine is just the opening arena in a much broader dynamic that is splitting the world into two opposing sets of economic alliances. This global fracture promises to be a ten- or twenty-year struggle to determine whether the world economy will be a unipolar U.S.-centered dollarized economy, or a multipolar, multi-currency world centered on the Eurasian heartland with mixed public/private economies. President Biden has characterized this split as being between democracies and autocracies. The terminology is typical Orwellian double-speak. By “democracies” he means the U.S. and allied Western financial oligarchies. Their aim is to shift economic planning out of the hands of elected governments to Wall Street and other financial centers under U.S. control. U.S. diplomats use the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to demand privatization of the world’s infrastructure and dependency on U.S. technology, oil and food exports. By “autocracy,” Biden means countries resisting this financialization and privatization takeover. In practice, U.S. rhetoric means promoting its own economic growth and living standards, keeping finance and banking as public utilities. What basically is at issue is whether economies will be planned by banking centers to create financial wealth – by privatizing basic infrastructure, public utilities and social services such as health care into monopolies – or by raising living standards and prosperity by keeping banking and money creation, public health, education, transportation and communications in public hands.
Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update November 5th to 8th
- In the News: Depletion of Strategic Petroleum Reserve Gets Credit for Recent Headline GDP Growth. Well timed in advance of the Mid-Term Elections, the Administration’s massive release of petroleum and heavy depletion of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve not only temporarily softened excessively high inflation into the latest headline reporting in September, but it also narrowed the U.S. Trade Deficit, given largely unadvertised exports of related oil, which, along with artificially depressed inflation, helped to generate a temporary boost to Third-Quarter 2022 GDP.
- Headline October 2022 Unemployment Rate U.3 deteriorated to 3.7%, from 3.5% in September, reflecting a rising count of unemployed against a continuing and unusual shrinkage of the headline Labor Force (employed plus unemployed).
- Payroll Employment rose by 261,000 in the month, within the expected range, having recovered its Pre-Pandemic Peak in August, gaining against, but still shy by about 5.6 million jobs of what would have been the normal level of payroll activity expected, at present, without the Pandemic. That suggests the system is about three years shy of full recovery
World:
The Russian Revolution: The Meaning of October Today is the 96th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, an event which altered the entire course of human history. For the first time – if we exclude the brief but glorious episode of the Paris Commune – the working people took power into their own hands and began the gigantic task of the socialist re-construction of society. Here we republish an article by Alan Woods, written in 1992 for the 75 anniversary of the Revolution, which gives an excellent overview of the revolution, highlighting the main lessons. “The October revolution laid the foundation of a new culture, taking everybody into consideration, and for that very reason immediately acquiring international significance. Even supposing for a moment that owing to unfavourable circumstances and hostile blows the Soviet regime should be temporarily overthrown, the inexpungable imprint of the October revolution would nevertheless remain upon the whole future development of mankind.” – Leon Trotsky – The History of the Russian Revolution
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