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Daily News Digest November 25, 2022

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:

UN chief Antonio Guterres on Tuesday urged rich countries to tax windfall profits of fossil fuel companies and use that money to help countriand people who are struggling with rising food and energy prices. Addressing world leaders at the 193-member UN General Assembly, the climate activist secretary-general stepped up his attacks on oil and gas companies, which have seen their profits explode by tens of billions of dollars. “The fossil fuel industry is feasting on hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and windfall profits while household budgets shrink and our planet burns,” he said. — Polluters Must Pay, Says UN Chief, Urges Taxes to Help Climate Victims

“Gun control advocates typically argue that we must center our policy responses on the consumers of weapons, to make acquiring and owning a gun more difficult — often including criminal penalties for gun ownership in various scenarios. … [But] this approach suffers from multiple risks and weaknesses,” Canon wrote, noting that such gun control laws would require implementation from law enforcement agencies that are “simply more likely to disproportionately target working-class people of color, who face disproportionate arrest and sentencing.” Instead of focusing on consumers, lawmakers should focus on ending protections for gun manufacturers, Canon said, explaining that: The most plain way to impose a cost on the gun manufacturing industry is repealing the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) and subjecting the industry to public nuisance and public health theories of liability. These strategies would begin to compel the industry to bear actual, constant and proportional costs of its reckless overproduction and marketing of arms. Alleged Virginia Walmart Shooter Who Killed 6 Was Employee of Store

Videos of the Day:

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley

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 Republicrats 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

White Supremist Settler State

No More Thanksgivings: Glen Ford’s Challenge to America Of the traditional US holidays, Thanksgiving was by far my favorite. I can do without the excessive commercialization of Xmas with its cheesy music that broadcasts for weeks on end. Cancel the forced festiveness of New Years and the sloppy drunks it generates; ditto for the militarism of July 4^th. So, what’s not good about coming together with friends and family and sharing a home cooked feast? I don’t want to ruin the party, but before you carve up the turkey, read the opening essay in Glen Ford’s The Black Agenda. His critique of the holiday is that the mythology surrounding Thanksgiving serves as a justification for our nation’s founding genocide of its native peoples and a validation of white supremacy. “The Thanksgiving story,” Ford explains, “is an absolution of the Pilgrims, whose brutal quest for absolute power in the New World is made to seem both religiously motivated and eminently human.” According to the mythos, the Pilgrims are depicted as victims of harsh weather and naïveté rather than the Christian fascists that they were.

Thanksgiving Can Never Be Redeemed From Its Colonial Past. Let’s Abolish It. The work of decolonization means refusing the banal evil of Thanksgiving. Decolonization — the act of rejecting colonial oppression — requires the abolition of that which is harmful. Decolonization is not reform nor recuperation. It involves concrete material actions, such as rematriation of lands and getting rid of oppressive colonial structures and creating something else from (or despite) the ashes of what needs to be destroyed for Indigenous, Black, Brown, queer, disabled, and all “othered” life to regenerate.

As Settler Colonialism and Genocide Continue, So Too Does Indigenous Resistance Lakota historian Nick Estes talks about Thanksgiving and his book “Our History Is the Future,” and the historic fight against the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock. “This history … is a continuing history of genocide, of settler colonialism and, basically, the founding myths of this country,” says Estes, who is a co-founder of the Indigenous resistance group The Red Nation and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.

Chomsky: US Sanctions on Iran Don’t Support the Protests, They Deepen Suffering Protests have been raging in Iran since mid-September in response to the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who died in a hospital in Tehran after being arrested a few days earlier by Iran’s morality police for allegedly breaching the Islamic theocratic regime’s dress code for women. Protesters are widely describing her death as murder perpetrated by the police (the suspicion is that she died from blows to the body), but Iran’s Forensic Organization has denied that account in an official medical report. Since September, the protests — led by women of all ages in defiance not only of the mandatory dress codes but also against gender violence and state violence of all kinds — have spread to at least 50 cities and towns. Just this week, prominent actors and sports teams have joined the burgeoning protest movement, which is reaching into all sectors of Iranian society.

When Given a Clear Economic Choice:Workers Vote in Their Own Class Interests!: Colorado Votes to Provide Universal Free School Meals by Taxing the Wealthy A ballot measure to create a universal free school meals program by reducing tax breaks for the wealthiest residents in Colorado has easily passed after federal lawmakers allowed a universal free lunch program to expire earlier this year. Proposition FF has officially passed, according to a call by The Associated Press on Wednesday, with about 55 percent of voters in favor and 45 percent against with 88 percent of the vote in, per the New York Times. The Healthy School Meals for All program will raise $100 million a year to provide and pay for meals in public schools, which advocates say will be crucial in lessening the burden of food insecurity for tens of thousands of students across the state

Environment: Ecosocialism or Ecocide!:

We Are Running Out of Time to Use Failing Strategies Against the Climate Crisis Author Peter Gelderloos describes the limits of governmental and market solutions and argues for bottom-up insurgency. Scientists, politicians and oil companies have been aware of the connection between fossil fuel production, ecocide and climate crisis for more than 70 years. Yet, in 2021, the world broke a record for carbon dioxide emissions. If the systems created by the wealthy could meaningfully address the crisis, they would have by now. Many of us feel immobilized, increasingly cognizant of this grim reality, but are unsure of where else to channel our energy. In his new book, The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution From Below, Peter Gelderloos offers a robust critique of governmental and market solutions claiming to address ecocide and contrasts them with a litany of examples of bottom-up solutions that have actually managed to slow the necropolitical gears making life on this planet uninhabitable. He encourages people who care for the environment to imagine and create their own dynamic, contextualized ecosystems of revolt, outside of electoral channels and situated within their territories.

Renewable Energy isn’t Replacing Fossil Fuel Energy—It’s Adding to It Despite all the renewable energy investments and installations, actual global greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing. That’s largely due to economic growth: While renewable energy supplies have expanded in recent years, world energy usage has ballooned even more—with the difference being supplied by fossil fuels. The more the world economy grows, the harder it is for additions of renewable energy to turn the tide by actually replacing energy from fossil fuels, rather than just adding to it.

Let’s Talk Turkey We face a momentous choice of whether to pursue a food future rooted in the ethic of sustainable agriCULTURE—or one based on the exploitative ethic of agriINDUSTRY. As the eminent farmer-poet-activist Wendell Berry tells us, eating is a profound political act. It lets you and me vote for the Butterball industrial model or choose to go back to the future of agriculture, which is the art and science of cooperating with, rather than trying to overwhelm, nature.

BP Declines to Reveal How Much ‘Loophole’ Saved It In Windfall Tax MPs hear concerns that investment in North Sea oil and gas reduces the tax, effectively rewarding fossil fuels over renewables . . .Appearing before MPs on the business, energy and industrial strategy (BEIS) committee, the BP vice-president Matthew Williamson said he did not know how much the firm would have paid without an investment allowance that reduces the windfall tax due if a company invests in North Sea oil and gas extraction. He also declined to say how much BP was spending on renewable energy projects this year. The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, last week slashed the investment allowance. Companies can only reduce their windfall tax bill by 29% of funds invested in extraction, down from the previous 80% discount. Hunt also increased the tax rate of the levy from 25% to 35% and extended its lifetime by two years.

Civil Rights/ Black Liberation:

Black Agenda Report

Labor:

Economy:

Michael Roberts Blog: More recession Signals The latest business activity indicators (November), called purchasing managers indexes (PMI), confirmed previous months’ that the major economic regions are now suffering from a contraction in output. The Eurozone composite PMI, which covers both manufacturing and services sectors came in at 47.8 in November. Although that was up from 47.3 in October, it was still below the 50 threshold between expansion and contraction and was the second weakest score since 2013. The manufacturing sector PMI fell for the sixth consecutive month. New orders fell for the fifth month running and employment growth was the weakest since March 2021. On this measure, the Eurozone capitalist sector is in recession. It was the same story for the UK, where the composite PMI was 48.3 in November, virtually unchanged from October, making the fourth month of contraction in a row. But the worst news came from the US where the composite PMI dropped sharply to 46.3 in November from 48.2 in October, near the largest monthly fall since the Great Recession of 2009. (GRAPH). The US capitalist sector is clearly in recession according to this PMI measure.

World:

Iran: Movement Organises Under the Whip Of Counter-Revolution Over two months since the beginning of the revolutionary uprising of Iranian youth, following an ebb under heavy repression, a new round of protests took place between 16-19 November, which show the whip of counter-revolution driving the movement forward. For final victory to be achieved, there must be mass, organised participation by the working class! The previous slogans of “Women, life, freedom”; “Death to the dictator”; “Death to tyrants – be they the Shah or [supreme] leader” continue to be used. But new slogans have been added, such as: “By the blood of our comrades, we will stand up til the end”, and: “Poverty and corruption will endure until we overthrow you.” The most militant protests are in Tehran, Tabriz, and the cities in Khuzestan, including Izeh, Abadan and Ahvaz; and the Kurdish-majority towns such as Mahabad, Saqqez and Sannadaj. The latter have again stood out as the most revolutionary, with general strikes breaking out once more, and violent clashes driving out the security forces. Barricades have been set up, and mountain passes and roads between the towns have been blocked.

Education, Health, 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