Daily News Digest December 9, 2022

Daily News Digest Archives

Images of the Day:

The Political Economy of Systemic U.S. Militarism

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:

It’s the holiday season, which means parents are doing last-minute gift shopping while their kids eagerly await a host of presents from family. Ironically, Congress is engaging in a similar exercise in its final few work weeks of the year, and lawmakers are poised to pass a massive defense budget that is sure to make military brass and defense contractors giddy with glee ahead of Christmas day. — Tt’s Going to Be a Good Christmas for War Hawks as Congress Considers Massive Defense Bill

Videos of the Day:

Scott Ritter – Lies and Deception About the Conflict

Rail Workers United Look for it here each week, publicly released at 7 AM Central Time each Tuesday morning. You may wish to get the e-newsletter version to read, or you may prefer to listen in to the headlines. Perhaps you want to do both!

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

Pax Americana Robber Barons: Bloated Pentagon Budget Is Indefensible After 20 years of ill-begotten wars, the brass expects to get $847 billion of our hard-earned tax dollars when they can’t even account for half of what they’ve already gotten.    The Pentagon just failed its fifth audit in as many years. After 20 years of war, there are better ways to spend tax dollars than on an agency that can’t even account for half of its assets.

Economic Costs of War Through Fiscal Year 2022, the United States federal government has spent and obligated $8 trillion dollars on the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. This figure includes: direct Congressional war appropriations; war-related increases to the Pentagon base budget; veterans care and disability; increases in the homeland security budget; interest payments on direct war borrowing; foreign assistance spending; and estimated future obligations for veterans’ care.     This total omits many other expenses, such as the macroeconomic costs to the US economy; the opportunity costs of not investing war dollars in alternative sectors; future interest on war borrowing; and local government and private war costs.     Public access to budget information about the post-9/11 is imperfect and incomplete. The scale of spending alone makes it hard to grasp. Public understanding of the budgetary costs of war is further limited by secrecy, faulty accounting, and the deferral of current costs.     The current wars have been paid for almost entirely by borrowing. This borrowing has raised the US budget deficit, increased the national debt, and had other macroeconomic effects, such as raising consumer interest rates. Unless the US immediately repays the money borrowed for war, there will also be future interest payments. We estimate that interest payments could total over $6.5 trillion by the 2050s.    Spending on the wars has involved opportunity costs for the US economy. Although military spending does produce jobs, spending in other areas such as health care could produce more jobs. Additionally, investment in nonmilitary public infrastructure such as roads and schools has not grown at the same rate as investment in military infrastructure.     Finally, in addition to federal war costs, the post-9/11 wars have cost billions of dollars of state, municipal, and private funds, including dollars spent on services for returned veterans and their families and local homeland security efforts.

From: America’s Aging Infrastructure Sags Under the Pressure of Climate Change—Crumbling Bridges and Water Systems —The United States is consistently falling short on funding infrastructure maintenance. A report by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker’s Volcker Alliance in 2019 estimated the U.S. has a US$1 trillion backlog of needed repairs.    Over 220,000 bridges across the country—about 33% of the total—require rehabilitation or replacement.    A water main break now occurs somewhere in the U.S. every two minutes, and an estimated 6 million gallons of treated water are lost each day. This is happening at the same time the western United States is implementing water restrictions amid the driest 20-year span in 1,200 years. Similarly, drinking water distribution in the United States relies on over 2 million miles of pipes that have limited life spans

Environment — Ecosocialism or Ecocide: 

Ecosocialism Not Extinction!

Protesters interrupt Canada’s Trudeau at COP15 Indigenous protesters and allies disrupted Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s speech at the COP15 biodiversity summit on Tuesday (December 16) in Montreal, beating drums and unfurling a banner that read “Indigenous genocide = ecocide. To save biodiversity, stop invading our lands.” 

UN Secretary Says “There Is No Planet B” as Global Biodiversity Summit Kicks Off Campaigners say this is our last chance to combat rampant species loss and adopt a solid framework to protect wildlife. The day before nearly two weeks of negotiations kick off at the United Nations summit on biodiversity, campaigners warned Tuesday that the talks taking place this month in Montreal may offer humanity its last chance to mitigate the planet’s crisis of rampant species loss, and called on policymakers to adopt an ambitious framework to protect wildlife.     More than 190 nations will be represented at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15), where negotiators will discuss a draft agreement aimed at conservation, slashing levels of toxic pollutants, and mitigating the climate crisis.     With about one million species — out of about 8.7 million known species — expected to become extinct in the coming decades, advocates said that policymakers must reverse more than a decade of failure to meet the targets set in 2010 at COP10 in Aichi, Japan, including protecting 17% of terrestrial and inland water areas and conserving coral reefs. 

Capitalists Do Not Fear The Governments That They Own!: George Montibot: Protection Racket The more destructive the business, the more likely it is to enjoy political protection. The more destructive the business, the more likely it is to enjoy political protection. In every conflict over the living world, something is being protected. And most of the time, it’s the wrong thing.    The world’s most destructive industries are fiercely protected by governments. The three sectors that appear to be most responsible for the collapse of ecosystems and erasure of wildlife are fossil fuels, fisheries and farming. In 2021, governments directly subsidised oil and gas production to the tune of $64bn (£53bn), and spent a further $531bn (£443bn) on keeping fossil fuel prices low. The latest figures for fisheries, from 2018, suggest that global subsidies for the sector amount to $35bn a year, over 80% of which go to large-scale industrial fishing. Most are paid to “enhance capacity”: in other words to help the industry, as marine ecosystems collapse, catch more fish.     Every year, governments spend $500bn on farm subsidies, the great majority of which pay no regard to environmental protection. Even the payments that claim to do so often inflict more harm than good. For example, many of the European Union’s pillar two “green” subsidies sustain livestock farming on land that would be better used for ecological restoration. Over half the European farm budget is spent on propping up animal farming, which is arguably the world’s most ecologically destructive industry.     Pasture-fed meat production destroys five times as much forest as palm oil does. It now threatens some of the richest habitats on Earth, among which are forests in Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Australia and Myanmar. Meat production could swallow 3m square kilometres of the world’s most biodiverse places in 35 years. That’s almost the size of India. In Australia, 94% of the deforestation in the catchment area of the Great Barrier Reef – a major cause of coral loss – is associated with beef production. Yet most of these catastrophes are delivered with the help of public money.

COP15: the Two Horsemen of the Apocalypse COP15 started this week in Montreal, Canada.  This is the UN’s biodiversity summit.  In effect, it is an international meeting to discuss how to cope with and reduce the impact of global warming and environmental destruction on nature.  As Carter Roberts, the US head of the World Wildlife Fund, put it: “It’s like two horsemen of the apocalypse — one is climate change and one is nature. They’re wound up with each other.”     “Humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction and governments must end the “orgy of destruction”, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said at the beginning of the meeting.  “We are out of harmony with nature. In fact, we are playing an entirely different song. Around the world, for hundreds of years, we have conducted a cacophony of chaos, played with instruments of destruction. Deforestation and desertification are creating wastelands of once-thriving ecosystems,” he said.  “Our land, water and air are poisoned by chemicals and pesticides, and choked with plastics … The most important lesson we impart to children is to take responsibility for their actions. What example are we setting when we ourselves are failing this basic test?” 

From  An Ecosocialist Manifesto:     We believe that the present capitalist system cannot regulate, much less overcome, the crises it has set going. It cannot solve the ecological crisis because to do so requires setting limits upon accumulation—an unacceptable option for a system predicated upon the rule: Grow or Die! And it cannot solve the crisis posed by terror and other forms of violent rebellion because to do so would mean abandoning the logic of empire, which would impose unacceptable limits on growth and the whole “way of life” sustained by empire. Its only remaining option is to resort to brutal force, thereby increasing alienation and sowing the seed of further terrorism . . . and further counter-terrorism, evolving into a new and malignant variation of fascism. In sum, the capitalist world system is historically bankrupt. It has become an empire unable to adapt, whose very gigantism exposes its underlying weakness. It is, in the language of ecology, profoundly unsustainable, and must be changed fundamentally, nay, replaced, if there is to be a future worth living.    Thus the stark choice once posed by Rosa Luxemburg returns: Socialism or Barbarism!, where the face of the latter now reflects the imprint of the intervening century and assumes the countenance of ecocatastrophe, terror counterterror, and their fascist degeneration.    But why socialism, why revive this word seemingly consigned to the rubbish-heap of history by the failings of its twentieth century interpretations? For this reason only: that however beaten down and unrealized, the notion of socialism still stands for the supersession of capital. If capital is to be overcome, a task is now given the urgency of the survival of civilization itself, the outcome will perforce be “socialist,” for that is the term which signifies the breakthrough into a post-capitalist society. If we say that capital is radically unsustainable and breaks down into the barbarism outlined above, then we are also saying that we need to build a “socialism” capable of overcoming the crises capital has set going. And if “socialisms” past have failed to do so, then it is our obligation, if we choose against submitting to a barbarous end, to struggle for one that succeeds. And just as barbarism has changed in a manner reflective of the century since Luxemburg enunciated her fateful alternative, so too, must the name, and the reality, of a “socialism” become adequate for this time.    It is for these reasons that we choose to name our interpretation of “socialism” as an ecosocialism, and dedicate ourselves to its realization.

Civil Rights Black Liberation:

 Labor:

Economy:

Senate Banking Chair Threatens a Subpoena If Sam Bankman-Fried Doesn’t Show for Next Wednesday’s Hearing; Says SBF “Orchestrated a Coverup” The past 48 hours has brought major developments in the battle lines being drawn in the crypto wars. Let’s start with the unusual letter that Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) sent yesterday to Sam Bankman-Fried, the ousted CEO of the collapsed and scandalized crypto exchange, FTX, via his new lawyer, Mark S. Cohen. Typically, if you want a witness to testify at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, one doesn’t tell his attorney in writing that you know the witness is guilty of law-breaking activities. (But then, again, most people credibly alleged to have done what Sam Bankman-Fried has done would by now be warming a cot in a cold prison cell.)

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   

United States Covid Pandemic is Far From Over!:

December 7         5,970 new cases and 318 new deaths 

December 6     40,291  new cases and 314 new deaths 

December 5     34,672  new cases and 173 new deaths 

December 4     33,882 new cases and 140 new deaths 

December 3     41,065 new cases and 164 new deaths