Daily News Digest December 1, 2022

Daily News Digest Archives

Images of the Day:

Why the Salton Sea is Turning into Toxic Dust

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:

Warren Buffett Negotiated in Bad Faith to Screw Rail Workers Out Of Sick Time, Rail Workers Deserve Better!

Videos of the Day:

“Enough Is Enough”: Rail Workers Decry Biden’s Push to Impose Strike-Breaking Labor Deal

Striking Univ. of California Grad Students Speak Out on Nation’s Largest-Ever Higher Education Strike

Meet Puerto Rican Journalist Bianca Graulau, Featured in Viral Bad Bunny Video on Injustices in PR 

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

The Recent Events Showed the Power of the Railworker’s Unions to Shut Down the Economy!

In a Dangerous President, The Government Has Attempted to Usurp the Right to Strike for a Better Contract! The sweetening, for the Union Bureaucracy to sell the bitter pill, is paid sick leave only if the Senate approves! House Passes Paid Sick Leave for Railway Workers Despite Opposition of 207 Republicans “Now let’s get it through the Senate,” said Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who led the fight to add seven days of paid sick leave to a White House-brokered contract that failed to provide any to railroad workers.  Just minutes earlier, 79 Republicans joined 211 Democrats to pass a strike-averting resolution that would impose Biden’s heavily criticized tentative agreement, which in its original form does not guarantee any paid sick leave. Five Republicans did not vote.      Biden—a self-described “pro-labor president”—has been condemned by rail workers and progressive lawmakers and advocacy groups for pressuring Congress to use its authority under the Railway Labor Act of 1926 to ram through his deal to preempt a looming strike.

What Railworkers Wanted What Thy Will Get!‘Put Up or Shut Up,’ Says Sanders as Progressives Move to Add 7 Sick Days to Railway Deal “If you can’t vote for this,” said the independent Vermont senator, “don’t tell anybody that you stand with working families.” Sen. Bernie Sanders said late Tuesday night that it was time to “put up or shut up” for any U.S. lawmaker who claims to fight for the working class as he and other progressives in Congress vowed to insert paid sick leave into a labor agreement between railway workers and the nation’s rail companies. 

Shame on “Union Joe” Biden for Not Siding With Railway Workers If rail workers are so important to our economy that a single week of striking could cost the economy $1 billion, and if their demands are so modest that any decent employer would easily exceed them, then meeting their demands seems like the obvious solution. 

Privatization, Poverty Threaten Water Affordability . . .  Water costs already pose a challenge for many low-income households, particularly in places with older infrastructure, Warner said. And with more than 30 states ending pandemic moratoriums on water shut-offs, she said, policymakers and water utilities should prioritize affordability programs to assist the neediest customers.     “Water affordability is a widespread and growing problem in the U.S., especially for low-income communities and communities of color,” Warner said. “This is not just a problem of aging infrastructure and poverty; private ownership contributes significantly to higher water bills and lower affordability.”

Environment: Ecosocialism or Ecocide!:

US to Spend $250m on Cleanup at California’s Toxic Salton Sea Move could help restore drying lake, a former resort destination that has deteriorated into an environmental crisis amid drought The US government said on Monday it will spend up to $250m over four years to help mitigate an environmental health disaster that has been brewing in California’s Salton Sea for nearly two decades.     The inland lake, which is fed by agricultural runoff and wastewater, has slowly been shrinking, exposing a powdery shoreline laced with arsenic, selenium and DDT. Dust from the drying lake has wafted into surrounding communities, exacerbating pollution and consequently respiratory conditions in one of California’s poorest and most environmentally burdened regions. 

Populist Climate Action Requires Thinking About Freedom From Specific Oppressors—Not Just Species Survival In September 2022, an international group of climate scientists published a study showing that the world was close to, or in some cases had even surpassed, key tipping points in the climate crisis that would trigger irreversible changes in the world’s ecosystems. These include the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, tropical coral reef die-off, the abrupt thawing of Northern permafrost, the loss of Barents Sea ice, the melting of mountain glaciers, the dieback of the Amazon rainforest, and changes to the West African monsoon that will impact the Sahel region of Africa.

COP27 Achieved Nothing. No surprise. Another UN climate meeting has come and gone. Yet again, it will make no difference whatsoever. The fossil fuel industry will continue to expand. Greenhouse gas emissions will increase. The climate crisis will get worse. Here’s a brief overview of some of what came out of COP27.

Revealed: More Than 70% of English Water Industry is in Foreign Ownership Foreign investment firms, private equity, pension funds and businesses lodged in tax havens own more than 70% of the water industry in England, according to research by the Guardian. The complex web of ownership is revealed as the public and some politicians increasingly call for the industry to be held to account for sewage dumping, leaks and water shortages. Six water companies are under investigation for potentially illegal activities as pressure grows on the industry to put more money into replacing and restoring crumbling infrastructure to protect both the environment and public health.

Australian Report Advises ‘Urgent Action’ to Combat Slavery in Clean Energy Supply Chains “We need to see industry, government, the financial sector, and civil society working together to provide access to competitively costed, slavery-free renewable energy.” The leading Australian clean energy association warned Tuesday that modern-day slavery plagues global renewable energy supply chains, and that the industry must take “urgent action” to ensure human and worker rights are respected as nations decarbonize.

Civil Rights Black Liberation:

Jim Crow Georgia!: Why We Filed with DOJ against Ballot Box Segregation Our legal action to force Georgia to reverse the shutting of ballot dropboxes in Black counties Atlanta, GA] Last week, our investigations team reported what media missed: the number of mail-in votes in Georgia plummeted by 83%, by over one million ballots since the last Election — almost all lost in the non-white majority Atlanta counties.     Did it make a difference? You bet: Two out of three Georgia mail-in ballots vote Democratic.     Now we’ve discovered that voters in the white-majority counties outside Atlanta have on average three times as many dropboxes per voter as Black Atlanta, a 314% difference imposed by Georgia’s new law SB202. Imposed by Jim Crow.     And Cheryl Moses won’t stand for it. Moses, editor of Black Gwinnett Magazine, today teamed with the Palast Investigative Fund and filed a formal complaint with the US Department Of Justice Civil Rights Division. The legal action demands the reversal of severe restrictions on ballot dropboxes, a method of voting the state knows full well was used by over half a million African-American voters in 2020.

Labor:

United States: Strike Action on the Rise – Marxists Join the Picket Lines Working-class militancy is on the rise across the US. Workers are engaged in organising battles at Trader  Joe’sStarbucksAmazonApple, and beyond. A wave of academic workers’ strikes is sweeping the country, with 48,000 teaching staff in the University of California (UC) system walking off the job, while on the other side of the country, part-time faculty shut down classes at The New School in New York

Economy:

Shadow Government Statistics November 29th to 30th

  • IN THE NEWS: STILL NO RECOVERY: Reported coming into the Thanksgiving Holiday
  • Final November 2022 Consumer Sentiment held shy by 43.8% (-43.8%) of ever recovering its Pre-Pandemic Peak.
  • October 2022 New Home Sales continued in collapse, despite a monthly bounce on top of downwardly revised September and August activity, on early track for a sixth consecutive quarter of annual contraction.
  • October Real New Orders for Durable Goods, Ex-Commercial Aircraft gained 0.1% in month, on early track for a second-consecutive quarterly contraction. TOMORROW’S COVERAGE: Second Estimate of Third-Quarter 2022 GDP.

With Crypto Bank, SoFi, the Fed Is Setting the Stage for the Same Disastrous Decision It Made with Citigroup in 1999  If there is one person in America who comprehensively understands the threats to the U.S. banking system, it is Arthur E. Wilmarth, Jr., author of the 2020 seminal book, Taming the Megabanks: Why We Need a New Glass-Steagall Act. Wilmarth is Professor Emeritus of Law at George Washington University Law School and has published more than 40 law review articles and book chapters in the fields of financial regulation and American constitutional history.

Despite Being Called the Madoff of Crypto, New York Times Features Sam Bankman-Fried at $2500 a Person Event Today You can’t make this stuff up. After promoting the false story that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and pushing the U.S. into a deadly and costly war through its reporter, Judith Miller; and using its editorial board to shill for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to advance the greedy Wall Street ambitions of Citigroup kingpin Sandy Weill, which ended up taking down the U.S. economy in 2008; the New York Times now appears determined to rehabilitate the reputation of the disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried, Co-Founder and recently ousted CEO of the bankrupt crypto exchange, FTX.  Bankman-Fried is being investigated on multiple continents, including North America, for stealing customer assets and looting his private investors. He has been compared, in headlines around the globe, to Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme.

World:

Brazil: For The Independence of PSOL! Do Not Join the Lula-Alckmin Government! A debate has opened up within the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) about the question of whether it should enter the Lula-Alckim government. The following open letter was drafted by our Brazilian comrades of Esquerda Marxista (Marxist Left), calling on the National Leadership of the PSOL to reject the decision of its National Executive to enter the Lula-Alckmin transition team, a first step towards entering a government that has committed to carrying out attacks on the working class in the name of ‘fiscal responsibility’.     While it was correct to call for a vote for Lula to defeat Bolsonaro, in order to be a point of attraction for the left, the PSOL must maintain its political independence from such a government. 

China: Anti-Lockdown Protests Light Powder Keg of Fury The last week has seen mass protests erupting across China, as anger against harsh lockdown measures explodes onto the streets. Workers and youth should have no trust in the liberals, but must wage a revolutionary struggle against the regime.      Barely a month after the Chinese Communist Party’s pompous 20th Congress, anger from below is bursting to the surface.     Last week, the Foxconn mega-factory in Zhengzhou, Henan, saw violent confrontation between workers and the police over wage theft by management.      And in the past few days, large and violent protests have been reported in many major cities, targeting the regime’s draconian lockdown measures, which have become a focal point for widespread discontent.     As we have long predicted, the deep crisis of Chinese capitalism is beginning to spur the masses into action.

Brazil: for the independence of PSOL! Do Not Join the Lula-Alckmin Government!  A debate has opened up within the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) about the question of whether it should enter the Lula-Alckim government. The following open letter was drafted by our Brazilian comrades of Esquerda Marxista (Marxist Left), calling on the National Leadership of the PSOL to reject the decision of its National Executive to enter the Lula-Alckmin transition team, a first step towards entering a government that has committed to carrying out attacks on the working class in the name of ‘fiscal responsibility’.     While it was correct to call for a vote for Lula to defeat Bolsonaro, in order to be a point of attraction for the left, the PSOL must maintain its political independence from such a government.

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   

Private Equity Is a Parasite Consuming the US Health System As Americans are overwhelmed with medical bills, patient financing is now a multibillion-dollar business, with private equity and big banks lined up to cash in when patients and their families can’t pay for care.