Daily News Digest December 22, 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:
The capitalist class and privileged strata of humanity may be able to survive collapse for decades to come even as a majority of humanity faces desperate struggles for survival that lead many to perish in the coming years. But there is eventually a terminal point to capitalist expansion as mass extinction and the radical alteration of the natural environment make life for our species and most others impossible. The only solution is a reversal of escalating inequalities through a radical redistribution of wealth and power downward as a first step in replacing the capitalist system, with its relentless pursuit of private profit at all cost, by an ecosocialism that prioritizes social need and harmony with the rest of nature. Theoretically sophisticated and engaging, this concise study will be satisfying to scholars yet accessible to a broader public concerned with the urgent political affairs of our day. — Can Global Capitalism Endure?
‘War’ On/For Drugs Quotes:
An article written in Counterpunch titled, Race and the Drug War, during the last election campaign, points out another factor of the “Drug War:” . . . Domestically, the ‘drug war’ has always been a pretext for social control, going back to the racist application of drug laws against Chinese laborers in the recession of the 1870s when these workers we reviewed as competition for the dwindling number of jobs available. The main users, middle-class white men and women taking opium in liquid form as ‘tonics’, weren’t harassed. By 1887 the Chinese Exclusion Act allowed Chinese opium addicts to be arrested and deported. In the 1930s the racist head of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Harry Anslinger, was renaming hemp as ‘marijuana’ to associate it with Mexican laborers and claiming that marijuana ‘can arouse in blacks and Hispanics a state of menacing fury or homicidal attack.’ By the 1950s Anslinger had pushed through the first mandatory drug sentences. As so often, Nixon was helpfully explicit in his private remarks. H.R.Haldeman recorded in his diary a briefing by the president in 1969,prior to launching of the war on drugs: ‘[Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.’ So what was ‘the system’ duly devised? On June 19, 1986, Maryland University basketball star Len Bias died from an overdose of cocaine. As Dan Baum put it in his excellent Smoke and Mirrors, The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, ‘In life, Len Bias was a terrific basketball player. In death he became the Archduke Ferdinand of the Total War on Drugs.’ It was falsely reported that Bias had smoked crack cocaine the night before his death. In fact he had used powder cocaine and there was no link between this use and the failure of his heart, according to the coroner. Bias had signed with the Boston Celtics and amid Boston’s rage and grief Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a Boston rep, rushed into action. In early July he convened a meeting of the Democratic Party leadership: ‘Write me some goddamn legislation,’ he ordered. ‘All anybody in Boston is talking about is Len Bias. They want blood. If we move fast enough we can get out in front of the White House.’ In fact the White House was moving pretty fast. Among other things the DEA had been instructed to allow ABC News to accompany it on raids against crackhouses. ‘Crack is the hottest combat-reporting story to come along since the end of the Vietnam war,” the head of the New York office of the DEA exulted. All this fed into congressional frenzy to write tougher laws. House Majority Leader Jim Wright called drug abuse ‘a menace draining away our economy of some $230 billion this year, slowly rotting away the fabric of our society and seducing and killing our young.’ Not to be outdone, South Carolina Republican Thomas Arnett proclaimed that ‘drugs are a threat worse than nuclear warfare or any chemical warfare waged on any battlefield.’ The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act was duly passed. It contained 29 new minimum mandatory sentences. Up until that time in the history of the Republic there had been only 56 mandatory minimum sentences. The new law had a death penalty provision for drug ‘king pins’ and prohibited parole for even minor possession offenses. But the chief focus of the bill was crack cocaine (mainly used in the inter-cities). Congress established a 100-to-1 sentencing ratio between possession of crack and powder cocaine (mainly used in the suburbs). Under this provision possession of five grams of crack carries a minimum five-year federal prison sentence. The same mandatory minimum is not reached for any amount of powder cocaine under 500 grams. This sentencing disproportion was based on faulty testimony that crack was 50 times as addictive as powdered coke. Congress then doubled this ratio as a so-called ‘violence penalty’.
In the 2001 article: War on Drugs Dirty Money Foundation of US Growth and Empire Size and Scope of Money Laundering by US Banks by James Petras, Professor of Sociology, Binghamton University, he explains that 500 Billion to a Trillion dollars gets added to world capitalist economy through “illegal means.” he concludes the article with the following: The increasing polarization of the world is embedded in this organized system of criminal and corrupt financial transactions. While speculation and foreign debt payments play a role in undermining living standards in the crisis regions, the multi-trillion dollar money laundering and bank servicing of corrupt officials is a much more significant factor, sustaining Western prosperity, U.S. empire building and financial stability. The scale, scope and time frame of transfers and money laundering, the centrality of the biggest banking enterprises and the complicity of the governments, strongly suggests that the dynamics of growth and stagnation, empire and re-colonization are intimately related to a new form of capitalism built around pillage, criminality, corruption and complicity. ‘This Goes Straight to the Top.’
This year, she will finally be old enough to learn the story that is encoded in the squat Hebrew letters engraved on each side of the dreidel: A Great Miracle Happened There. But what miracle of Hanukkah should I teach her? You would think there is a straightforward answer to this question. After all, there is a historical record of the Hanukkah story. In 167 BCE in occupied Jerusalem, there was a Jewish uprising against the repression of the Roman Empire led by a group of rebels known as the Maccabees (literally the “hammers.”) Miraculously, the ragtag group of radicals won against one of the largest empires the world has ever seen. This is the miracle that dominates modern retellings of Hanukkah: the marvel of resistance. — Zionism Made Hanukkah About Israel, But It’s Always Been a Holiday of Diaspora
Videos/Podcasts of the Day:
Scott Ritter: NATO’s Hair Trigger: The Polish Missile Incident was a Close Brush With Nuclear Annihilation The fervor with which Poland and others sought to drag NATO into a war with Russia should ring alarm bells for everyone
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
National Strategy To Develop Distributed Ledger Technology For Digital ID Tucked Into 2023 Defense Budget Prosecutions of Water Protectors in Aitkin County are seven times more likely to remain unresolved than other cases. The corrupt DC uniparty has conspired against voters who elected a Republican majority in the House to put a stop to wasteful spending driving inflation, by pushing for a massive omnibus bill as the Christmas holiday deadline looms. In a setup for the vote on the omnibus bill, on December 15, 2022, Congress passed a one-week Continuing Resolution along with the National Defense Authorization Act of 2023 (NDAA), which is the defense budget for next year. The NDAA is headed to Biden’s desk for signature. Members on both sides of the isle have praised their efforts on the passage of the NDAA, which includes repealing the Covid injection mandate for service members. While revoking the Covid jab mandate for military members is a victory garnering much of the focus, other aspects of the $858 billion dollar defense bill have gone completely unnoticed. The devil is always in the details. Tucked inside this massive defense bill is the creation of a “National research and development strategy for distributed ledger technology” to build the framework for a digital enslavement system nationwide. Though this agenda has been explicitly laid out by the Biden regime over the course of 2022, it has been years in the making as outlined in the Corey’s Digs report entitled ‘The Global Landscape on Vaccine ID Passports’ Part 3 and Part 4.
Patrick Lawrence: Between Myth and History Patrick Lawrence delivered the following remarks, based on his book Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century, before the Committee for the Republic in Washington on December 15. The Committee is a nonpartisan group founded in 2003 that advocates a restoration of the U.S. Constitution, notably the War Powers Act, which assigns Congress, and not the Executive, the power to declare war. Patrick Lawrence delivered the following remarks, based on his book Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century, before the Committee for the Republic in Washington on December 15. The Committee is a nonpartisan group founded in 2003 that advocates a restoration of the U.S. Constitution, notably the War Powers Act, which assigns Congress, and not the Executive, the power to declare war. Here’s my lead this evening: How sweet it will be for our Republic when the day arrives on which we admit we have failed. What splendid vistas will lie before us when we at last accept that our idea of who we are and what we are meant to do in the world has been defeated. In short, we are a nation desperately in need of failure and defeat. We need these things precisely so that we can realize ourselves and our great, underserved potential in new ways and as fully as we can—this for our own sake but also for the world’s.
Progressives Slam Omnibus Retirement Provisions as ‘Giveaway to the Rich’ “The retirement changes in the omnibus package overwhelmingly benefit wealthy people… while doing almost nothing for the people who truly struggle to save for retirement,” said one advocate. Progressive advocacy groups and economic analysts on Tuesday denounced retirement savings-related tax changes embedded in Congress’ end-of-year $1.7 trillion spending package, characterizing the pending reforms taken directly from the SECURE 2.0 Act as a “giveaway to the rich.”
Congress Has One Last Chance to Abolish the Crack Cocaine Sentencing Disparity Merrick Garland’s recent memo was an important first step, but only Congress can fully end the sentencing disparities. Reformers applauded Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday for instructing federal prosecutors to treat crack cocaine and powder cocaine as the same drug when seeking “mandatory minimum” prison sentences. However, the Justice Department’s new policy carves out several exceptions for prosecutors seeking lengthy sentences. To finally put an end to this historic injustice, advocates say, Congress must strike the cocaine sentencing disparities from the federal books and free people from prison who are currently serving mandatory minimum sentences. Such legislation passed the House but has stalled in the Senate as lawmakers face year-end deadlines.
Environment — Ecosocialism or Ecocide:
Water Protector Defense Attorneys Warn of “Breakdown in Separation of Powers” From late 2019 through 2021, at least 115 Water Protectors were arrested in Aitkin County, Minnesota (population 15,800) for their resistance to Enbridge Inc.’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline. Today, 50 defendants continue to face charges, according to Marla Marcum of the Climate Disobedience Center, which has been tracking cases and offering support to defendants. Open cases include seven social media-based prosecutions including of Winona LaDuke, co-founder of the Native advocacy organization Honor the Earth, and Tara Houska, an administrator of the Giniw Collective Facebook Group. These cases, which reference social media activity in charging documents, have produced trumped-up charges ranging from “harassment of law enforcement” for yelling to charges that derive from Minnesota’s 2002 Anti-Terrorism Act, which was passed in response to the September 11 attacks.
Keystone Pipeline Raises Concerns After Third Major Spill in Five Years An investigation into the pipeline’s largest spill is under way in Kansas as a recent report points to a deteriorating safety record The Keystone pipeline, which traverses 2,600 miles from western Canada through the central US, leaked an estimated 14,000 barrels of oil, more than half a million gallons, into a creek in Washington county, Kansas, on 7 December. The incident was the largest onshore oil spill since at least 2013, the Keystone pipeline’s third major spill in the last five years, and the largest since it began operating in 2010.
Civil Rights Black Liberation:
Labor:
Media Falsely Prescribes Pain to Workers as Only Solution to Inflation This dynamic plays out in the media like a bait and switch, in which reporters acknowledge and sympathize with the pain of ordinary people, but prescribe them more pain as the only way out. Federal Reserve chair (Sandle) Jerome Powell is profit’s prophet and the corporate media are his cultish devotees, joining hands to sacrifice working people. In this cult, profit is sacrosanct.
The Inflation rate, since 1979, to now is 392%!: Only the 1% have gained. The working class has not!: Fueling Inequality, Earnings of Top 0.1% in US Have Soared by 465% Since 1979: Analysis The bottom 90%, meanwhile, saw earnings growth of just 29% between 1979 and 2021, the Economic Policy Institute found. A new analysis released Wednesday shows that earnings inequality in the United States has risen dramatically over the past four decades and continues to accelerate, with the top 0.1% seeing wage growth of 465% between 1979 and 2021 while the bottom 90% experienced just 29% growth during that same period.
Economy:
Michael Roberts: Can Global Capitalism Endure? Can global capitalism endure? William Robinson tries to answer this question in his book entitled with the same question. Robinson is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In a fast-moving account, Robinson covers a lot of ground in offering the reader a vision of the global capitalist crisis and the accompanying international conflagration. It flows like an essay rather than a stodgy full-length book. As Robinson says, “my aim is to present a “big picture” snapshot in a shorter work and from the vantage point of global capitalism theory that takes into account some elements of global capitalism that have come furt. her into focus in recent years, especially the ever-deeper financialization and digitalization of the global economy and society.” As such, the book offers no original research and relies on the work of others. Fair enough, as Robinson’s objective is to convince the reader that the “survival of global capitalism beyond the present crisis requires a substantial restructuring involving a measure of transnational regulation of the global economy and a redistribution of wealth downward. Even at that, though, a new period of economic reactivation and prosperity will not bring to an end the threat to our survival. For that, we must do away with a system whose drive to accumulate capital puts it at war with the mass of humanity and with nature. Only an ecosocialism can ultimately lift us from the threat.”
Shadow Government Statistics December 20th to 22nd
- IN THE NEWS: No Economic Recovery here
- November 2022 New Residential Construction (Building Permits and Housing Starts) continued in collapse amidst downside revisions.
- Previously, inflation-adjusted November 2022 Real Retail Sales declined month-to-month and year-to-year, on top of downside revisions to September and October activity.
- November 2022 Industrial Production declined month-to-month, slowing year-to-year, reflecting parallel movements in the meaningful Manufacturing and Mining sectors.
- Capacity Utilization continued to sink, increasingly shy of ever recovering its August 2018 economic peak.
- PENDING COVERAGE: The third and final estimate of Third-Quarter 2022 GDP will be released and reviewed here on Thursday, December 22nd
Sam Bankman-Fried’s Criminal Trial Judge Is Married to Law Partner of Firm that Arranged the FTX-BlockFi Deal Last week the New York Times did a puff piece on the judge that will be presiding over the Sam Bankman-Fried criminal trial in the Federal courthouse in lower Manhattan. The judge is Ronnie Abrams. The narrative at the New York Times is that Abrams’ “husband, Greg Andres, is an accomplished former Brooklyn federal prosecutor….” Our take is that Greg Andres is part of Ronnie Abrams’ immediate household and a law partner of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, a law firm that has problematic ties to Bankman-Fried’s bankrupt crypto exchange, FTX, and another crypto firm it became enmeshed with, BlockFi, which is also now in bankruptcy.
World:
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 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