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Daily News Digest January 4, 2023

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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:

Racial Hatred?: You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught You’ve got to be taught To hate and fear, You’ve got to be taught From year to year, It’s got to be drummed In your dear little ear, You’ve got to be carefully taught. . . .

In The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man, Friedrich Engels wrote:“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. …”In December 1999, when I first wrote my essay Whither Humanity? (The Environmental Crisis of Capitalism), there were some doubters, on the left, about the science of the article. However, the essay has held up quite well in the past eight years. Since that time, we now know that “Carbon dioxide rates have been accelerating — that the rate of increase in carbon dioxide emissions has more than doubled since the 1990s”!

Videos/Podcasts of the Day:

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!):

Envisioning a World Without Nuclear Weapons While nuclear weapons governments and their bomb-making industries are criminally sleepwalking into what could mean the end of our planet’s life, many others are countering the weapons holders’ political idiocy. January 22 marks the second anniversary of the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, a global lifeboat supported by 70% of the world’s countries. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2023 budget request for nuclear weapons’ upgrade is more than $21 billion and close to $8 billion for radioactive and chemical cleanup at nuclear weapon sites across the country. Stack this up against the same department’s 2023 budget for energy efficiency and renewable energy—$4 billion—and we see the future: weapons trump wind turbines; war worsens climate crisis. Moreover, the government’s budget has no line items for the massive existential costs of nuclear weapons, three of which are described here:

the dread that world-ending nuclear bombs provoke in humans (unless we have become “numb to… that culture of mass death”);
the “forever” radioactive contamination that eludes cleanup to human and environmental safety standards, the estimated cost of just one site, Hanford, Washington, being $300 billion to $640 billion; and
the theft and poisoning of Indigenous peoples’ lands and culture for mining uranium, generating bomb-grade plutonium and conducting above-ground atomic bomb testing.

Hanford, Washington is the site of the largest plutonium-production reactors in the world from 1944 to 1987 (including for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki). The Hanford land, bordering the Columbia River, was effectively stolen from four Indigenous tribes and peasant farmers by the federal government and is now “arguably the most contaminated place on the planet,” according to Joshua Frank, author of Atomic Days.

On the propagation of the “Official Narrative” There’s so much whining about “fake news” being propagated on “social media.” Corporate media is all a-bleat about social media because their viewership is plummeting. No sensible, rational person bothers tuning into the tripe they’re spewing. As if the corporate media has ever been about “real news,” instead of being massive corporate-funded propaganda organs pumping out the “official narrative.” But social media, with all its programmable algorithm bots, is a much more insidious propagator of the “official narrative” than even its corporate media counterparts. A conscientious activist might attempt to communicate anything that contradicts “official narrative,” and the tireless algorithm bots immediately sniff out any verboten trigger words and “Voila! that person’s readership is throttled back to zero.

Biden’s “Diplomacy” In Yemen Means Taking Saudi Arabia’s Side — And Could Spark All-Out War The White House said Bernie Sanders’s war powers resolution would prolong the war, but that’s what its own efforts are doing. When Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called for a vote on a war powers resolution that would block U.S. support for the Saudi-led war effort in Yemen, the Biden administration immediately pushed back. The resolution, the White House warned, would upset diplomatic efforts and bring about the war it was trying to end. “The Administration strongly opposes the Yemen War Powers Resolution on a number of grounds, but the bottom line is that this resolution is unnecessary and would greatly complicate the intense and ongoing diplomacy to truly bring an end to the conflict,” read White House talking points circulated privately. “In 2019, diplomacy was absent and the war was raging. That is not the case now. Thanks to our diplomacy which remains ongoing and delicate, the violence over nearly nine months has effectively stopped. The White House’s claims that its diplomacy is working, however, are undercut by its own political moves and the reality on the ground. President Joe Biden’s envoy for the conflict has consistently sided with the Saudi coalition against the Houthi movement that controls much of the country. And though a ceasefire during the spring and summer provided a respite in civilian casualties due to bombings, the ongoing Saudi blockade and economic warfare against Yemenis perpetuates the humanitarian crisis in the country — which the United Nations has deemed the worst in the world.

Freedom: Challenging Domination or License to Dominate? Many white people in the U.S. are entrenched in a fight to protect white supremacy as their old privileges and senses of themselves as being special and normative are being undermined by moves toward racial equality. When the people on the streets in Iran use the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the freedom they refer to is freedom from domination. Iranians are living under a regime that limits what they can say, how they dress, and how they may gather and organize. Their government is imprisoning, torturing, and killing people who are challenging domination and demanding freedom. “Woman, Life, Freedom” resonates with the slogan of the French Revolution: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” In that context, “liberty” also meant freedom from domination: domination by the church, domination by the rich, and domination by the monarchy.

Environment — Ecosocialism or Ecocide:

Ecosocialism Not Extinction!

2022 Will Be Remembered for Its Brutal Climate Change Impacts At the same time, 2022 was a breakthrough year of climate action juxtaposed on the increasingly stark evidence that fossil fuels and their producers are the primary cause of the planet’s growing peril. The year 2022 was a tough year around the world in terms of climate disaster, something that the just exploded “bomb cyclone” seemed to punctuate with an exclamation point as the storm crippled much of the nation in a sub-zero deep freeze and led to the death of at least 40 people in western New York. Fortunately, we were spared the theatrics of misleading statements and snowballs in the halls of Congress as scientists explained how rapid warming of the Arctic may have led to the major disruption of the “polar vortex” allowing the dramatic escape of winter Arctic air to wreak havoc far to the south. A record-deadly blizzard stands as a bone-chilling paradox in the face of the much more deadly poster child of climate change—record-breaking heat waves supercharged by climate change. And 2022 saw lots of these. Close to home, summer once again brought record heat across much of the United States, extreme heat that continued to worsen megadrought in the Southwest and wildfire disaster and health risks across a wider swath of the western United States. However, bad as the heat wave impacts in the United States were in 2022, they were dwarfed by the expanse of heat extremes around much of the planet.

Don’t Look Up! — Capitalists Priorites: College Textbooks Cover the Climate Crisis Less Than They Did Before 2010 Coverage of climate solutions dropped to 3 percent of the total content on climate change from 15 percent in the 90s. Evidence is mounting fast of the devastating consequences of climate change on the planet, but college textbooks aren’t keeping up. A recent study found that most college biology textbooks published in the 2010s contained less content on climate change than textbooks from the previous decade, and gave shrinking attention to possible solutions to the global crisis. The study, conducted by researchers with North Carolina State University, was based on an analysis of 57 college introductory biology textbooks published between 1970 and 2019. The researchers found that coverage of climate change increased over the decades, to a median of 52 sentences in the 2000s.

Agroindustry Lobby Is Using the Ukraine War to Push Unsustainable Farming Policy Warfare killed pollinators and threatened food security in World War II. It’s happening again in Ukraine. . . . After the war, food shortages continued for many years as Europe recovered, so policies to increase food production were left in place. Munitions factories that no longer needed to make explosives for bombs switched to making fertilizers. Nerve agents developed to kill people in the war turned out to be useful for killing insect pests. So, industrial farming was born. It quickly became clear that this farming system was doing great environmental damage. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, in which she highlighted the impacts that pesticides were having — poisoning farmers, livestock and wildlife. Nonetheless, the industrialization of farming continued more or less unchecked through the 20th century. Other problems became evident: Soils were becoming degraded and impoverished, rivers and lakes polluted with fertilizers and farming had become a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Bumblebees and other pollinators — my speciality — were in rapid decline in a landscape where flowers were few but pesticides were common. . . In recognition of the ongoing environmental crisis, the EU is now attempting a major shift toward sustainable farming in its new “Farm to Fork” strategy. This plan aims to halve pesticide use and change the emphasis in farming from maximizing yield to sustainable production, nurturing soils and wildlife and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

‘Absolute Madness’: Record-Shattering Heat Dome Hits Europe It’s “the most extreme event ever seen in European climatology,” said one climatologist. “Nothing stands close to this.” As Europe closed the books on its warmest year ever recorded, an exceptionally potent winter heat dome descended on much of the continent over the holiday weekend, with thousands of daily and monthly high-temperature records shattered from Spain to Russia. . . . Bilbao in northern Spain reached 24.9°C, the hottest temperature recorded for the city in January and more akin to a summer’s day than the start of the year. Records were broken throughout Germany, including Dresden in the east where it was 13.5°C. Temperatures in Switzerland were at 20°C. The Czech Republic recorded a January national record of 19.6°C at the town of Javornik

Practical Nuclear Fusion 1s Still Just Hype Don’t believe the headlines: there’s much less happening than pro-fusion pundits claim In a dramatic scientific and engineering breakthrough, researchers at the Bay Area’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently achieved the long-sought goal of generating a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than was directly injected into a tiny reactor vessel. By the very next day, pundits well across the political spectrum were touting that breakthrough as a harbinger of a new era in energy production, suggesting that a future of limitless, low-impact fusion energy was perhaps a few decades away. In reality, however, commercially viable nuclear fusion is only infinitesimally closer than it was back in the 1980s when a contained fusion reaction — i.e. not occurring in the sun or from a bomb — was first achieved. While most honest writers have at least acknowledged the obstacles to commercially-scaled fusion, they typically still underestimate them — as much so today as back in the 1980s. We are told that a fusion reaction would have to occur “many times a second” to produce usable amounts of energy. But the blast of energy from the LLNL fusion reactor actually only lasted one tenth of a nanosecond — that’s a ten-billionth of a second. Apparently other fusion reactions (with a net energy loss) have operated for a few nanoseconds, but reproducing this reaction over a billion times every second is far beyond what researchers are even contemplating.

Civil Rights Black Liberation:

Systemic Racism: The Uncounted People of color are dying at much higher rates than covid data suggests. It’s not always easy to identify a COVID-19 death. In Portland, deaths from causes indirectly related to the pandemic went up in 2021 even as official COVID deaths remained relatively constan. If one dies at home, if they have symptoms not typically associated with the disease or if they die when local health systems are overwhelmed, their death certificate might say “heart disease” or “natural causes” when COVID-19 is, in fact, at fault. New research shows such inaccuracies also are more likely for Americans who are Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native. The true toll of the COVID-19 pandemic on many communities of color—from Portland, Oregon, to Navajo Nation tribal lands in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, to sparsely populated rural Texas towns—is worse than previously known. Incorrect death certificates add to the racial and ethnic health disparities exacerbated by the pandemic, which stem from long-entrenched barriers to medical care, employment, education, housing, and other factors. Mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention point to COVID-19’s disastrous impacts, in a new analysis by the Documenting COVID-19 Project at Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation and MuckRock, in collaboration with Boston University’s School of Global Public Health; the USA TODAY Network; the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting; Willamette Week in Portland; and the Texas Observer.

Labor:

Economy:

Recession Will Hit a Third of the World This Year, IMF Chief Warns Kristalina Georgieva says next couple of months will be ‘tough for China’ due to spread of Covid Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email [email protected] to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here. A third of the global economy will be hit by recession this year, the head of the IMF has said, as she warned that the world faces a “tougher” year in 2023 than the previous 12 months. The US, EU and China are all slowing simultaneously, said IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva. “We expect one-third of the world economy to be in recession,” Georgieva told US TV network CBS in an interview that aired on Sunday, adding that “half of the European Union will be in a recession” this year. The IMF in October cut its 2023 outlook for global economic growth, citing the continuing drag from the war in Ukraine as well as inflation pressures and interest rate rises by major central banks.

Two Law Firms Played Key Roles in Sam Bankman-Fried’s House of Cards; One Is Now Collecting Upwards of $2,165 an Hour in FTX Bankruptcy Proceedings Thus far, they are the “untouchables.” The law firms that were at the side of Sam Bankman-Fried every step of the way as he built the FTX crypto exchange — an enterprise that Justice Department prosecutor Damian Williams calls “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.” Bankman-Fried, the former co-founder and CEO of FTX, has been indicted on eight criminal counts and is wearing a monitoring device as he awaits trial. Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Bankman-Fried’s now bankrupt hedge fund, Alameda Research, which prosecutors say looted FTX customers’ money, has pleaded guilty to a 7-count criminal indictment. Gary Wang, the former Chief Technology Officer of FTX Trading Ltd., has pleaded guilty to four criminal counts.

World:

Today’s Conquistadors: Untangling Elite Opposition to Indigenous Rights in Chile Throughout Chile’s constitutional process, elites have opposed Indigenous demands in defense of the status quo beginning in October 2019, the Mapuche flag became a regular fixture at the mass protests known as the estallido social across Chile. In multiple cities, demonstrators toppled statues of colonizers, rejecting the symbols of centuries of colonialism and oppression. Since the uprising, Indigenous rights have become an increasingly prominent part of Chilean political conversations. When 155 delegates began drafting a new constitution in 2021, 17 were Indigenous representatives, and Mapuche scholar Elisa Loncon served as president of the Constitutional Convention for the first six months. Together with other representatives, their work led to the inclusion of many Indigenous rights and recognitions in the draft constitution.

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

Direct Action Vs Class Struggle From activists gluing themselves to trains, to throwing soup at paintings: recent years have seen numerous groups employing ‘direct action’ tactics to achieve their aims. Instead, Marxists call for mass organised struggle by workers and youth. From activists glueing themselves to trains, to throwing soup at paintings: recent years have seen numerous groups employing ‘direct action’ tactics to achieve their aims. Instead, Marxists call for mass organised struggle by workers and youth. Following a recent Socialist Appeal article about animal rights protests in Britain, direct action group Animal Rebellion (AR) responded, providing a defence of their strategy, tactics, and demands. Click here or scroll down to read their reply at the bottom of this page. In the piece below, Socialist Appeal activist Joe Russell explains the limits of the methods and programmes adopted by direct action groups like AR, and presents a Marxist alternative.