Daily News Digest December 26, 2022
Images of the Day:
Some History Of Federal Government/Monsanto Revolving Door
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:
One of the stated objectives [of the Warren Commission] was to calm the fears of the people about a conspiracy. But in our country, the government has no right to calm our fears, any more than it has, for example, the right to excite our fears about Red China, or about fluoridation, or about birth control, or about anything. There’s no room in America for thought control of any kind, no matter how benevolent the objective is. Personally, I don’t want to be calm about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I don’t want to be calm about a president of my country being shot down in the streets. — Amtraks Across America: the Ghost of Jim Garrison in New Orleans
Videos/Podcasts of the Day:
Scott Ritter. Video 2022-12-23. Zelensky goes to Washington
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!
Has the Worm Turned in the Assange Case?: One of the world’s most courageous whistleblowers, Daniel Ellsberg challenged U.S. prosecutors on December 6 to come after him, as they have pursued Julian Assange. The 91-year-old Ellsberg, whom the U.S. security state decades ago possibly hoped to drive to suicide, announced that he too had received leaked materials containing evidence of U.S. war crimes from former military analyst Chelsea Manning. “Let’s take this to the Supreme Court,” Ellsberg said, ready to contest the constitutionality of the ghastly Espionage Act, used against him and now Assange.
Military Conspiracies and QAnon’s Fascist Roots Following on from the CIA’s early removal of themselves from psi-research in the mid-seventies, throughout the early 1980s one of the central characters in overseeing the US militaries excitable remote reviewing experiments was the late Brigadier General Albert Stubblebine III (1930-2017) – a man who was the commanding general of the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command from 1981 to 1984. Although he retired from active service in 1984, Stubblebine achieved global notoriety after the release of George Clooney’s Hollywood blockbuster The Men Who Stared at Goats (2009) in which he starred as the General who tried, but ultimately failed, to manifest the ability to walk through walls. In addition to promoting 9/11 conspiracy theories, delusional thinking always defined General Stubblebine’s life, and so it makes sense that his wife, Dr. Rima Laibow, remains a keen promoter of the health freedom movement’s nonsense concerning the allegedly sinister globalist agenda revolving around Codex Alimentarius. Such darkly paranoid views echo those of the president of the decidedly right-wing National Health Federation, whose president, Scott Tips, edited the movement’s now keystone text Codex Alimentarius – Global Food Imperialism (2007). For the record, Tips’ forerunner at the head of the National Health Federation was the late Maureen Salaman, whose longstanding activism with the John Birch Society was rounded off when she helped found the Populist Party with Holocaust denier Willis Carto and then stood as their vice-presidential candidate for the 1984 elections.
Greg Palast: True the Vote’ Vigilantes Finally. The Department of Justice has finally taken on ‘True the Vote’, the right-wing group behind the wrongful challenge of hundreds of thousands of legal Georgia voters. True the Vote challenges were the central subject of the film Vigilante, Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman created by the Palast Investigative Fund team. I know what you’re thinking: Why did Justice sue two weeks AFTER the election? Luckily, the film and our related reports got out in Georgia before the election. We held special vvoter impact showings from Coffee County to Gwinnett to Valdosta. Crucially, we confronted and exposed True the Vote’s agents, every one a Republican official, scaring them away from further challenges. Luckily, the film and our related reports got out in Georgia before the election. We held special voter impact showings from Coffee County to Gwinnett to Valdosta. Crucially, we confronted and exposed True the Vote’s agents, every one a Republican official, scaring them away from further challenges.
Top US CEOs Make More in Seven Hours Than Average Workers Earn in an Entire Year: Analysis “Public outrage over these extreme pay gaps is now so high that a majority of Americans across the political spectrum favor a cap on CEO pay relative to worker pay.” The typical CEO of a major U.S. corporation has to work fewer than seven hours to make the amount of money that the average worker earns in an entire year, according to a new analysis by Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies.
How Private Equity Gave Rise to Extreme Inequality The dominance of predatory financial firms has allowed a class of super-rich investors to exert vast control over our economic and political lives. Today, the top 0.01% of the wealthiest people in America hold more of the country’s total wealth than that same group did during the Gilded Age, a time of unrestrained financial speculation—but also of grinding poverty, corruption, and racial strife. That extreme concentration of wealth is in large part attributable to the dominance of Wall Street over American life, bankers’ and investors’ willingness to manufacture and exploit crises, when the spoils are greatest. The centrality of finance in the United States and across the globe arose through successive waves of neoliberal reform over the last half century involving the privatization of profits and externalization of risk.
AOC Casts House Dems’ Sole Vote Against Omnibus Spending Bill “The dramatic increase in DHS and ICE spending… cuts against the promises our party has made to immigrant communities across the country,” Ocasio-Cortez explained as the $1.7 trillion package passed the lower chamber Friday. “At a time of rising authoritarianism, ecological collapse, criminalization of abortion, etc., Democratic leadership continues to strengthen the very institutions that will bring about overt fascism.”
Environment — Ecosocialism or Ecocide:
The Revolving Door Between Monsanto, the FDA, and the EPA: Your Safety in Peril In order to provide truly ethical checks and balances within our government and the FDA and the EPA, one wouldn’t expect there to be any compromising situations, like ex-Monsanto lawyers assigned to government posts, but that is exactly the issue we are faced with.
Monsanto and the Merchants of Poison Last week, the report Merchants of Poison: How Monsanto Sold the World on a Toxic Pesticide was published by authors Stacy Malkan, Kendra Klein and Anna Lappé. Their report tells a story goes back to 2012 where the study’s authors examine how pesticide and processed food companies spent $45 million to defeat a ballot initiative to label GMOs (genetically modified foods) in California. This campaign was led by Monsanto, one of the planet’s largest producers of GMOs and it created a gigantic media campaign designed to influence public opinion and influence political decisions. The authors of this report demonstrate how Monsanto created a PR storm through the mouths of so-called third-party “experts” from across the fields of academia and science. It was later revealed that these allegedly neutral voices were closely tied to Monsanto. In 2013, pesticide companies tried to resuscitate their images in winning back public trust. They faced an even steeper PR crisis when the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2015 concluded that glyphosate—the chemical contained within herbicides that most GMO crops have been engineered to resist—is likely a human carcinogen. In light of these revelations, thousands sued Monsanto claiming that their exposure of Monsanto’s glyphosate-based product, Roundup, caused their cancers.
Temporarily Passing Paris Climate Targets Could ‘Significantly’ Raise Tipping Point Risk: Study “To effectively prevent all tipping risks, the global mean temperature increase would need to be limited to no more than 1°C—we are currently already at about 1.2°C,” noted one scientist.
Clean Energy or New Weapons: What the Fusion Breakthrough Really Means On December 13, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced that the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had reached a “milestone”: the achievement of “ignition” in nuclear fusion earlier in the month. That announcement was hailed by many as a step into a fossil fuel-free energy future. US Senate majority leader Charles Schumer, for example, claimed that we were “on the precipice of a future no longer reliant on fossil fuels but instead powered by new clean fusion energy”. But in truth, generating electrical power from fusion commercially or at an industrial scale is likely unattainable in any realistic sense, at least within the lifetimes of most readers of this article. At the same time, this experiment will contribute far more to US efforts to further develop its terrifyingly destructive nuclear weapons arsenal. Over the last decade or so, there have been many similar announcements featuring breathless language about breakthroughs, milestones, and advances. These statements have come with unfailing regularity from NIF (for example, in 2013) and the larger set of laboratories and commercial firms pursuing the idea of nuclear fusion. Apart from the United States, similar announcements have come from Germany, China and the United Kingdom. France is expected to take its turn once the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) starts operating. The reactor is currently being built in Cadarache, France, at an estimated cost of somewhere between $25 billion to as high as $65 billion, much higher than the original estimate of $5.6 billion.
No Restraints — No Liability Fracking!: Make Big Oil Pay to Clean Up Their Mess on Public Lands, Coalition Tells Interior Dept “It’s bad enough that we allow fossil fuel companies to drill on federal lands,” said one advocate. “The least we can do is ensure taxpayers don’t get stuck subsidizing the fossil fuel industry’s cost of doing business.” A trio of advocacy groups on Thursday urged the U.S. Interior Department to do more to fix the nation’s “broken oil and gas leasing system.” Hundreds of progressive organizations, including Public Citizen, have called on President Joe Biden’s administration to halt fossil fuel extraction on public lands and waters. But Public Citizen, Project On Government Oversight, and Taxpayers for Common Sense argued in a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Director Tracy Stone-Manning that as long as the federal leasing program exists, new rules should b
Civil Rights Black Liberation:
Labor:
Railroads Riding High After Victory Against Workers In the aftermath of the congressional contract fight, two major railroads are pursuing a merger and a third is retaliating against a worker for organizing. FRESH OFF A victory against workers demanding sick days as part of recent contract negotiations, two major railroads are pursuing a merger and a third, owned by billionaire Warren Buffett, is retaliating against one railroader who helped lead the push for better working conditions. On Wednesday, a coalition of 10 organizations sent a letter to the Surface Transportation Board urging it to reject the merger of Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern on a number of different grounds, warning that further consolidation would lead to diminished service, higher prices, and more trucks on the road, despite rosy promises from the carriers to the contrary. Concentrated and brittle supply chains, they argue, have already helped drive inflation amid the pandemic.
The Real Lessons From the Railway Labor Dispute The outrage and alarm produced by the mere threat of these workers to withhold their labor reveal that our economy functions because workers… work. So, the threatened railway workers strike is over. President Joe Biden used his authority over interstate commerce to impose a settlement. As we all watch CNN and FOX News breathe a sign of relief, let’s see if there is a lesson to be learned from these events. Let’s take a brief look at the background of the dispute. The American railway system was deregulated in the 1980s. And, as always seems to happen, consolidation and profit-taking followed close upon the deregul-ation. What was once over 30 operating railroad companies was reduced to just seven through buyouts and mergers. These seven firms have all worked to increase their profits by reducing staffing, increasing and intensifying the workload of the remaining workers, and drawing back investment in safety equipment and other costly projects while increasing prices and rates.
Economy:
The Fall of the House of Stanford On June 14th, 2012, R. Allen Stanford was sentenced by US District Judge David Wittner to 110 years in federal prison for his role in a $7 billion fraud scheme. On pronouncing the sentence, Judge Wittner said that Stanford treated his victims like “economic roadkill.” Here is the story of his rise and fall. This is the story of a deadbeat banker. His name is Allen Stanford and he was once known as the $7 billion man. Now, he faces federal indictments that charge him with running a vast Ponzi scheme that bilked depositors out of billions.
Industrial Policy is Not a Remedy for Income Inequality The idea of industrial policy has taken on almost a mystical quality for many progressives. The idea is that it is somehow new and different from what we had been doing, and if we had just been doing industrial policy for the last half-century, everything would be better. This has led to widespread applause on the left for aspects of President Biden’s agenda that can be considered industrial policy, like the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the infrastructure package approved last year. While these bills have considerable merit, they miss the boat in terms of reducing income inequality in important ways
World:
Moscow’s Leverage in the Balkans: Since September, Kosovo’s fragile stability that has endured since 1999, following intervention by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), has grown progressively precarious. Clashes between ethnic Serbians and Kosovo security forces saw Serbia’s military placed on high alert in November. Several high-profile Serbian officials, including President Aleksandar Vučić, announced that the Serbian military could be deployed to northern Kosovo to protect the ethnic Serbs, who make up the majority of the population in the region. Moscow has natural incentives to provoke the crisis. An unraveling of regional security would create more obstacles for Serbia’s EU aspirations, optimistically slated for 2025. The West’s support for Kosovo has historically undermined Serbia’s European integration effort, and 51 percent of Serbs polled by Belgrade-based pollster Demostat in June 2022 said they would vote against EU membership in a national referendum.
Into the 21st Century: the Killing Fields of Palestine Continue O little town of Bethlehem, How miserable we see thee lie! Below thy 28 ft. high concrete separation wall of Aparthied, Palestinians cower in fear and sleepless nights. The silent stars are witness to thy dark and somber deeds and streets. Where the light shineth not, And the everlasting darkness of occupation Hangs heavy on oppressed infants and the occupied. Nazi-like Zionist hatred and violence of the past 71 years Kill hope and instill fear in every Palestinian’s heart. And nothing but arrests, theft, torture and killings Are fears that meet thee every single minute Of every single day, and every single night
Thomas Friedman and the Myth of Liberal Israel Israel is in the process of putting together an aggressively racist rightwing government under the leadership of the unprincipled Benjamin Netanyahu. This is not the first such repugnant government Israelis have elected. Indeed, at least three prior times in its short history, the Israeli Jewish electorate has chosen ideologically committed fanatics (in those cases, having the additional allure of terrorist pasts), as their leaders: Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and Menachem Begin. Nor were these judgments of the electorate exceptions that were somehow contrary to Israel’s national character. They were all, as is now also the case, logical outcomes of a national point of view—represented by Israel’s Zionist state ideology—which has always been fundamentally racist, and which, on frequent occasions, raises to frenzied heights often.
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