Daily News Digest December 30, 2022

Daily News Digest Archives

Images of the Day:

‘The System’ Is Ruining Our Present and Collective Future

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:

As a primary architect of originalism, Bork had become by the mid-1980s — along with Ed Meese, Reagan’s attorney general — the face of a legal counterrevolution aimed at reversing the expansion of civil rights and liberties that had been achieved during Chief Justice Earl Warren’s tenure on the court (1953-1969). His mission was to turn back the judicial clock to a pre-New Deal version of the United States.  — Robert Bork’s Revenge

The Supreme Court’s controlling majority of six Republican activists has embraced originalism as an article of faith and practice. Under the stewardship of Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has deployed its tools and techniques to reinterpret the Constitution and create a legacy of legal devastation with a series of landmark rulings on voting rights, gerrymandering, union organizing, the death penalty, environmental protection, gun control, abortion and campaign finance.The court’s current session, which opened in early October, promises to deliver more of the same, with cases on “religious liberty” and LGBTQ discrimination, the “independent state legislature” doctrine, affirmative action and more. — Robert Bork’s Revenge How the Supreme Court was remade in the image of the original Originalist. — Robert Bork’s Revenge

Videos/Podcasts of the Day:

Censorship Forever Wars Glenn Greenwald

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!):

Environment — Ecosocialism or Ecocide:

Ecosocialism Not Extinction!

‘The System’ Is Ruining Our Present and Collective Future We are destroying the natural world that humans depend upon for life itself—air, water, soil, vegetation, and wildlife—while degrading the social and economic sphere, creating a vast chasm between the megarich and everyone else.     Now is a time of unprecedented opportunity for progressive change. The reason is simple: “the system” is ruining the future for young people. Any system that threatens the future of its young people cannot retain their support and therefore is ripe for basic change.     Every morning, the daily news provides fresh evidence that “the system” is heading off a cliff—fruitless climate talks; growing nuclear threats; microplastics in food, water, breast milk and newborn babies; oceans damaged by warming, acidification, and dead zones; the military-industrial dragon preparing for war with China; Congress out of touch and deadlocked…. But there’s also good news: every day more young people are waking up to the facts and demanding that the system change.

George Monbiot: My Burning Shame: I Fitted My House With Three Wood-Burning Stoves Wood burners are incredibly bad for the environment – and flood our homes with toxins, too. I wish I’d known that in 2008 . . . . I now know, thanks in large part to the dedicated reporting of the Guardian environment editor, Damian Carrington, that I couldn’t have been more wrong. Wood smoke is astonishingly harmful. Though only 8% of households in the UK (mostly wealthy ones) have a wood-burning stove, they release more small particulates (the most dangerous pollutants) than all the vehicles on the road. Even a modern, approved, “eco-friendly” wood burner produces 750 times as many fine particulates as a heavy goods vehicle.     We have some figures for the deaths believed to be caused by outdoor air pollution: between 26,000 and 38,000 a year in England. But we have no data on the impact of indoor air pollution, of which wood-burning stoves, in the homes that have them, are by far the biggest source. Every time you open the stove door to refuel, your home is flooded with tiny particulates, accompanied by other toxins, including benzene, formaldehyde and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, pushing pollution levels way above World Health Organization guidelines.     These poisons can affect every organ in the body. Tiny particles pass straight through your lungs into the bloodstream. Wherever they lodge they cause harm. They’re associated with a wide range of cancers, heart and lung disease, strokes, dementia and the loss of intelligence. 

Donziger Files Response to ‘DOJ’s Disastrous Decision to Side With Chevron’ “This appeal seriously impacts Amazon communities, the rule of law, and free speech,” said environmental lawyer Steven Donziger. “Let’s keep fighting.” The legal team of human rights attorney Steven Donziger is challenging what he describes as the U.S. Department of Justice’s “disastrous decision to side with Chevron and back private corporate prosecutions.”     At issue is the DOJ’s recently submitted brief in opposition to Donziger’s pending appeal of his widely criticized contempt of court conviction. Donziger’s reply to the Justice Department’s December 16 brief was filed Tuesday at the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Future of the Amazon Rainforest Under Lula On the heels of the environmentally hostile Bolsonaro, the incoming administration has big plans, and bigger challenges Luiz Inácio da Silva, the progressive politician popularly known as Lula, is poised to take office as the president of Brazil on January 1. His administration is set to embrace a return to environmental protection following the destructive policies of outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro. Key to these efforts is slowing the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest,more than half of which is in Brazil.     “There is no climate security for the world without a protected Amazon,” Lula said in aspeech at the United Nations COP27 meeting in Egypt in November. “We will do whatever it takes to have zero deforestation and the degradation of our biomes.”

Civil Rights Black Liberation:

In dramatic contrast to Perry’s and Friedly’s conclusions about Malcolm X’s assassination, is a book by Washington Post staff writer Karl Evanzz titled,The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. In this book, Evanzz documents how the intelligence community, the CIA, the FBI, and the New York Police Bureau of Special Services (BOSSI) using agents provocateurs and infiltrators; set the stage for the assassination of Malcolm X.    It outlines the motives for their actions. Evanzz spent 15 years researching over 300,000 pages of declassified FBI and CIA documents. From Page 214 of The Judas Factor: (A few days after Malcolm X’s press conference announcing his split from the NOI) “William C. Sullivan (FBI) contacted the directors of BOSSI and asked them to recruit several African Americans to infiltrate Malcolm X’s new organization. Among the directors at the time were two men who later would play key roles in the scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation: Anthony Ulasewicz, the infamous bagman of Watergate, and Nixon advisor John J. Caulfield.     “Ulasewicz was all too happy to comply with Sullivan’s request. Malcolm X had been a thorn in the New York Police Department’s side for more than a decade. He told Sullivan that he would have officers ready to infiltrate Malcolm X’s new organizations within thirty days.    “While Sullivan was coordinating the domestic counterintelligence program against Malcolm X with BOSSI, the CIA initiated a similar program to determine the extent of Malcolm X’s influence with Third World leaders. ’What do we have on Malcolm X?’ a CIA official wrote in an inter-office memo dated March 10. The request for information had come from the U.S. State Department. The official ordered a clerk to run a thorough check in the CIA’s database to determine which Third World countries seemed receptive to Malcolm X. . .” — Roland Sheppard, The Assassinations of M.L.K. Jr. and Malcolm X

FBI Cointelpro is Back and Worse Than Ever Elon Musk has opened the floodgates to expose the FBI’s latest war on Americans’ freedom of speech.  The FBI massively intervened to pressure Twitter to suppress accounts and tweets from individuals the FBI disapproved, including parody accounts.  The FBI and other federal agencies also browbeat Facebook, Instagram, and many other tech companies.     Thus far, most of the American media has ignored or downplayed the story, known as the Twitter Files. Since many of the individuals who the FBI got squelched were pro-Trump, the violation of their rights is a non-issue – or a cause for quiet celebration.  At this point, it is difficult to know whether the scant reaction to the Twitter Files is the result of political bias, collective amnesia, or simply a total ignorance of American history.     The history of the FBI provides perhaps the best guide to the abuses that may be now occurring. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI carried out “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order,” a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO involved thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, to destroy activists’ marriages, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and anti-war organizations.

Two Barrels Aimed at African People’s Socialist Party  With new FBI and Department of “Justice” (DOJ) attacks expected in early January, a defense, mobilization and information session attracted hundreds of allies of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP).  On Friday, December 23 they zoomed into the “Emergency Mass Meeting: Hands Off Uhuru! Hands Off Africa!”  The APSP told its supporters that it expects indictments in early January 2023 and possibly sooner.     Indictments could include many more than the four names listed as “unindicted co-conspirators” during raids of July 29, 2022: Chairman Omali Yeshitela, Party Director of Agitation and Propaganda Akilé Anai, African People’s Solidarity Committee Chair Penny Hess and Uhuru Solidarity Movement Chair Jesse Nevel.  At 5 am that morning, the FBI invaded multiple St. Louis locations, including the private residence of Omali Yeshitela and his wife and APSP Deputy Chair Ona Zené Yeshitela and the Uhuru Solidarity Center, as well as the Uhuru House in St. Petersburg FL.

Study Ties Abortion Restrictions to ‘Significant’ Jump in Suicide Rates for Young Women “This association is robust—and it has nothing to do with politics,” said one co-author. “It’s all backed by the data.” With abortion currently inaccessible in over a quarter of U.S. states, peer-reviewed research published Wednesday highlights the impact of cutting off care, revealing that restricted access is linked to increased suicide risk in young women.     Published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, the analysis of targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) laws was conducted by four experts at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the University of Pennsylvania (Penn).

Labor:

Union Organizing Surged in 2022: Let’s Push for a Radical Labor Movement in 2023 More workers are forming independent unions, untethered from the AFL-CIO and other established labor groups.  The year 2022 saw a significant increase in working-class unrest in the United States. Millions of workers quit their jobs in 2021, and this trend has continued in 2022. Most moved on to different employ-ment, while others continued their education or retired. Recently, many Twitter employees quit in response to the severe force reduction and intensification of work effort engineered by new owner Elon Musk. For those working, there has been a wave of what the media has dubbed “quiet quitting,” but which is really an old-fashioned labor strategy known as “working to rule,” or doing no more than what you have been ordered or contractually required to do. Those working from home have shown a reluctance to return to the office, an indication that, despite the problems of laboring where you live, offices are seen as worse.

Differed Maintenance and Understaffing (Cutting Jobs)=Unsafe Rail Travel!: 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. . . .  Let’s take a brief look at the background to 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 deregulation.     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.     For example, the companies introduced something called “Precision Scheduled Railroading,” which cut staffing and safety on the rails thereby endangering workers and the surrounding communities. The so-called upside of all these changes was reduced costs and increased profits. And, as usual, the latter were used to make payments to shareholders and investors. Unnoticed by many, these changes also meant that anything that allowed workers unscheduled time off (such as paid sick leave) would seriously disrupt what has become a more or less “bare bones” operation that relies on a minimum of employees to move a lot of stuff crucial to our economy which is built on “just-in-time” production, inventory, and logistics.     These profit-above-all changes made the railroad system especially dependent on a minimized workforce. It could not withstand the paid sick leave system the unions wanted. The new railroad system as a whole relied on the denial of the basic health and safety needs of the workforce. As a result, recent employee surveys showed three of the top five worst employers in the country were rail companies.

Economy:

Shadow Government Statistics December 27th to 29th

• IN THE NEWS: Suggestive of still-higher inflation ahead, the most-liquid November 2022 “Basic M1” (Currency plus Demand Deposits) money component boosted to a new high, along with systemic flight to liquidity, at a new 52-year peak. Separately, the Fed also boosted the level of the November 2022 Monetary Base, as suggested previously by ShadowStats.

• Last week, full-month December 2022 Consumer Sentiment held shy by 40.9% (-40.9%) of ever recovering its Pre-Pandemic Peak. In context of consistently stable monthly reporting, the annual decline in November 2022 Existing-Sales deepened to an extraordinary 35.4% (-35.4%). In context of ridiculously unstable monthly reporting, the annual decline in November New Home Sales deepened to 15.3% (-15.3%). Dominated by plunging Commercial Aircraft Orders, November 2022 Real New Orders for Durable Goods dropped by 2.4% (-2.4%) month-to-month, down by 0.1% (-0.1%) year-to-year

World:

Flush With Record Profits,Flush With Record Profits, Exxon Sues to Block EU Windfall Tax Exxon posted a staggering $19.7 billion in profits in the third quarter of 2022 as consumers continued to face high energy costs. Fresh off posting the highest quarterly profit in its history, the U.S.-based fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil sued the European Union on Wednesday in an attempt to stop the bloc from imposing its recently approved windfall tax targeting major oil and gas companies.   The Financial Times, which first reported the new lawsuit, noted that the challenge takes aim at the European Council’s “legal authority to impose the new tax—a power historically reserved for sovereign countries—and its use of emergency powers to secure member states’ approval for the measure.”

Kosovo Closes Main Border With Serbia Amid Protests, Rising Tensions “It is paramount that all involved avoid any rhetoric or actions that can cause tensions and escalate the situation,” said the leader of NATO’s mission in Kosovo. “Solutions should be sought through dialogue.” Kosovo shut down its largest border crossing with Serbia on Wednesday, underscoring the extent to which tensions between the two Balkan countries are rising. Albanian-majority Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 with Western support, roughly a decade after North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces intervened and carried out a bombing campaign on behalf of ethnic Albanians during a 1998-1999 civil war.     Serbia has refused to recognize the statehood of its former province, however. Instead, according toAgence France-Presse, Belgrade has encouraged 120,000 ethnic Serbs living in Kosovo to defy Pristina’s authority—especially in northern Kosovo where Serbs constitute the majority.

Thousands March in Occupied Territories Demanding Release of Bodies of Palestinians Israel has kept the bodies of over a hundred Palestinians who were killed by its forces or died inside its prisons as ‘bargaining chips’, including that of Palestinian freedom fighter Nasser Abu Hmeid who died last week.

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   

How Does U.S. Life Expectancy Compare to Other Countries?  Life expectancy in the U.S. and peer countries generally increased from 1980-2019, but decreased in most countries in 2020 due to COVID-19. From 2020 to 2021, life expectancy at birth began to rebound in most comparable countries while it continued to decline in the U.S. The CDC estimates life expectancy at birth in the U.S. decreased to 76.1 years in 2021, down 2.7 years from 78.8 years in 2019 and down 0.9 years from 2020. The average life expectancy at birth among comparable countries was 82.4 years in 2021, down 0.2 years from 2019 and up 0.4 years from 2020. (Note: 2021 life expectancy estimates for Canada are not yet available and therefore excluded in the comparable country average for 2021.)

 U.S. Life Expectancy 1950-2022 Chart and table of U.S. life expectancy from 1950 to 2022. United Nations projections are also included through the year 2100.

• • The current life expectancy for U.S. in 2022 is 79.05 years, a 0.08% increase from 2021.

  • The life expectancy for U.S. in 2021 was 78.99 years, a 0.08% increase from 2020.

  • The life expectancy for U.S. in 2020 was 78.93 years, a 0.08% increase from 2019.

  • The life expectancy for U.S. in 2019 was 78.87 years, a 0.08% increase from 2018.

Cuba Life Expectancy 1950-2022 Chart and table of Cuba’s life expectancy from 1950 to 2022. United Nations projections are also included through the year 2100.

• The current life expectancy for Cuba in 2022 is 79.08 years, a 0.12% increase from 2021.

• The life expectancy for Cuba in 2021 was 78.98 years, a 0.12% increase from 2020.

• The life expectancy for Cuba in 2020 was 78.89 years, a 0.12% increase from 2019.

• The life expectancy for Cuba in 2019 was 78.79 years, a 0.12% increase from 2018.