Daily News Digest December 28, 2022

Daily News Digest Archives

Images of the Day:

Kinda Over the ‘Founding Fathers Intent’Latuff: Farha Film About a 14 year old girl is 1946 Palestine who watches from a locked pantry as catastrophe consumes her home.

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:

If you go back to the record of the Constitutional Convention, which took place in 1787, almost immediately after the end of the war, you see that they are already moving in another direction. James Madison — who was the main framer, and one of the Founding Fathers who was most libertarian — makes it very clear that the new constitutional system must be designed so as to ensure that the government will, in his words, “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” and bar the way to anything like agrarian reform. The determination was made that America could not allow functioning democracy, since people would use their political power to attack the wealth of the minority of the opulent. Therefore, Madison argues, the country should be placed in the hands of the wealthier set of men, as he put it. — Noam Chomsky on American History and Democracy

Videos/Podcasts of the Day:

Ukraine’s LAST STAND w/ Scott Ritter and Dan Kovalik!

A Federal Response to Long COVID and Other Complex Chronic Conditions

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!

Both Parties Support U.S. Capitalism’s Wars (The Only War the Democrats Opposed was the Civil War!): 

Chris Hedges: The Democrats Are Now the War Party The Democratic Party has become the party of permanent war, fueling massive military spending which is hollowing out the country from the inside and flirting with nuclear war.     The Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking their support for the war industry in moral language stretching back to Korea and Vietnam, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was as lionized as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. All the wars they support and fund are “good” wars. All the enemies they fight, the latest being Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, are incarnations of evil. The photo of a beaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding up a signed Ukrainian battle flag behind Zelensky as he addressed Congress was another example of the Democratic Party’s abject subservience to the war machine.

The Corporate Media’s Commitment to ‘Both Sides’ Coverage Is Dangerous You know what would actually benefit politics in the United States? A media system that was willing to point out who was causing demonstrable problems, rather than pretending that “both sides” are always to blame.    The Washington Post (12/16/22) had a recent headline: “Can Politics Kill You? Research Says the Answer Increasingly Is Yes.” And the lead of the article, by Akilah Johnson, told readers of two studies that reveal what it calls “an uncomfortable truth”:     The toxicity of partisan politics is fueling an overall increase in mortality rates for working-age Americans.     But when you read further into the article, you find that politics is not really the problem here. One of the studies, the Post reported, found that “people living in more conservative parts of the United States disproportionately bore the burden of illness and death linked to Covid-19.” The other found that “the more conservative a state’s policies, the shorter the lives of working-age people.”     Raskin Says Electoral College Is a ‘Danger’ to Democracy and Should Be Abandoned “We should elect the president the way we elect governors, senators, mayors, representatives, everybody else: Whoever gets the most votes wins.”     “The Electoral College now, which has given us five popular vote losers as president in our history, twice in this century alone, has become a danger, not just to democracy, but to the American people,” Raskin (D-Md.) said in an appearance on “Face the Nation” Sunday. “It was a danger on January 6. There are so many curving byways and nooks and crannies in the Electoral College that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief.”

Environment — Ecosocialism or Ecocide:

Ecosocialism Not Extinction!

Markets and Technology Won’t Solve Climate Crisis. We Must End Capitalism. It’s the accumulation of capital that’s destroying the Earth System as a place of human habitability Climate change — caused primarily by capitalism’s incessant burning of fossil fuels — is happening faster than even the most pessimistic scientists predicted, causing freak weather events and mass displacement worldwide. From floods submerging one third of Pakistan to temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit (100°F) in the Siberian Arctic, evidence abounds that rich countries better cut off their fossil fuel dependence fast. Among those rich countries, argues John Bellamy Foster in his new book, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, the United States is the epicenter. The U.S. military alone boasts a carbon footprint larger than that of many countries.

Biggest Climate Toll in Year of ‘Devastating’ Disasters Revealed Most expensive storm cost $100bn while deadliest floods killed 1,700 and displaced 7 million, report finds  The 10 most expensive storms, floods and droughts in 2022 each cost at least $3bn (£2.5bn) in a “devastating” year on the frontline of the climate crisis, a report shows.     Christian Aid has highlighted the worst climate-related disasters of the year asmore intense storms, heavy downpours and droughts are driven by rising global temperatures as a result of human activity 

BP Faces Backlash Over Plans to Spend Much More on Fossil Fuels Than Green Energy “This is how much greenwashing fossil fuel corporations care about the climate emergency,” said climate scientist Bill McGuire. “They really don’t give a sh*t.”     BP has worked hard—and spent big—to craft a public image as a forward-looking, environment-conscious oil and gas company that’s committed to a sustainable future.     But its actions tell an entirely different story.    The Guardianreported Tuesday that the London-based fossil fuel giant has earmarked up to $7.5 billion for oil and gas projects for the coming year compared to $3-$5 billion set aside for so-called “low carbon” initiatives. BP has previously touted its “clean energy” investments as evidence that it is helping to lead the global transition to renewables.

Extreme Cold Is Caused by Global Warming It from palm trees onto unsuspecting pedestriansseems Biblical: in Texas, bats are freezing and falling from trees; in Florida cold-stunned iguanas are raining down . Last Friday, with this recent bomb cyclone, 53.7% of the nation was covered in snow; more than any time since record-keeping began—as the oil industry knowingly lies to us and rakes in profits.

Civil Rights Black Liberation:

Labor:

From my experience, s a rand and filer and as a labor official, the NLRB is not proworker, but pro the Labor bureaucracy and Pro Labor-Boss-Partnership!: US Military’s 2023 Budget Boost Is 3,200 Times Larger Than NLRB’s Increase If a budget reveals what we value, this one should give us pause: extravagant spending for the war machine, scraps for workers Draft text of the congressional omnibus spending bill released last week reveals a proposed $25 million increase in funding to the National Labor Relations Board, which would bring the agency’s 2023 federal fiscal year budget to $299 million. Its funding has otherwise been frozen at $274 million for the past nine years; when inflation is taken into account, this effectively amounts to a budget decrease of 25% since 2014, according to calculations cited in an NLRB news release. 

On the First Workday of the New Year, the Average CEO Will Make More Than an Average Workers Earns in an Entire Year If the typical CEO of a large U.S. corporation clocks in at 9 am on January 2, by 3:37 pm that afternoon he’ll have earned $58,260 — the average annual salary for all U.S. occupations.       In other words, in less than seven hours on the first workday of the New Year, that CEO will have made as much as the average U.S. worker will make all year.

Economy:

The Fed is doubling down on what appears to be a failed policy, driving the economy to the brink of recession without bringing prices down appreciably. Inflation results from “too much money chasing too few goods,” and the Fed has control over only the money – the “demand” side of the equation. Energy and food are the key inflation drivers, and they are on the supply side. As noted by Bloomberg columnist Ramesh Ponnuru  in the Washington Post in March: Fixing supply chains is of course beyond any central bank’s power. What the Fed can do is reduce spending levels, which would in turn exert downward pressure on prices. But this would be a mistaken response to shortages. It would answer a scarcity of goods by bringing about a scarcity of money. The effect would be to compound the hit to living standards that supply shocks already caused. — What Does the Fed’s Jerome Powell Have Up His Sleeve?

World:

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   

Merry Christmas! We’re All Being Murdered by Capitalism! Covid-19 and Its Sequels Our response to Covid-19 should make us dubious about our chances if we go up against something even deadlier. Only 5.5 billion people have gotten even one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, leaving billions more to host a constantly proliferating assortment of mutations. Already vaccines and therapeutics are less effective against new variants.      With some bad rolls of the dice, we could be back to the world of March 2020, or worse. This scenario is increasingly likely considering climate change and globalization. Another accurate point in “The Communist Manifesto” is that “the need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”      Sure, we could have decided to vaccinate everyone. Last year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated this would cost $50 billion, or 0.05 percent of the world’s annual gross domestic product.      But we didn’t do it for a very good reason: This would have hurt the “intellectual” “property” — and hence the profits — of Moderna and Pfizer.     So the downside here is our unending Covid nightmare. The upside is we now have 10 vaccine billionaires! We’d like to believe they’re spending this Christmas Eve together, downing negroni sbagliatos somewhere on the Amalfi coast, toasting the freedom that is capitalism. (If you violate their vaccine patents, the government will crush you like a bug.)

The Extent and Demographics of Long COVID Disability in United States In October 2022, CEPR published an initial analysis of the first wave of nationally representative data on the extent to which Long COVID limits the daily activities of adults in the United States. This article updates that analysis by using data from all three waves of the (HPS) conducted by the Census Bureau in September, October, and November 2022. It also expands on the earlier analysis to include state-level results, which are now more reliable given the larger sample size available by pooling multiple waves of data.    Key findings include:

• In Fall 2022, nearly 35.2 million US adults reported ever having Long COVID, including 17.2 million adults who are currently experiencing it.

• The vast majority of adults with Long COVID report that the symptoms limit their daily activities to at least some extent. Of the 17.2 million adults with current Long COVID, about 13.7 million said the symptoms limit their daily activities, including 4.3 million who said their daily activities were limited “a lot.”

• There was considerable state variation in the percentage of adults experiencing Long COVID and Long-COVID-related disability. On the high end, 11.6 percent of all non-elderly adults in West Virginia had Long COVID in Fall 2022, and 10.3 percent reported that it limited their daily activities. By contrast, Long COVID prevalence and disability rates in the District of Columbia were less than half of those in West Virginia. 

• Women were more likely than men to report both Long COVID symptoms and related activity limitations.

• Hispanic/Latino adults were more likely than both Black and white adults to report Long COVID symptoms and activity limitations. 

• Among age groups, Long COVID symptoms and activity limitations were most common among 40-to-54-year olds and least common among elderly adults, perhaps due in part to survivorship bias. At the same time, among adults with Long COVID, those ages 55 and older were more likely to say their symptoms limited their daily activities “a lot.” 

• Inequality in Long COVID disability rates reflects economic inequality. Adults living in households with annual incomes under $50,000 were three times as likely as those in households with annual incomes of $100,000 or more to report Long COVID symptoms that limited their daily symptoms “a lot.”

• Among adults with Long COVID who also reported a recent loss in household earnings, over 90 percent said their symptoms limit their daily activities, and nearly 40 percent said symptoms limit their activities “a lot.”