Daily News Digest January 6, 2023

Daily News Digest Archives

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Ted Rall: Work Remotely As a Cop

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 Capitalism 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:

Always remember that the origin of Sars/Covid is a Mutation of the Sars Virus!

House Delock: Capitalist Still Debating over to gradually apply  The Iron Heel! 

You don’t get good journalism out of The Times’s Moscow bureau. It has long been as simple as that. The weight of ideology, as transmitted through their employers and editors, bears too heavily upon those who staff it. In Troianovski’s Russia, nothing good ever happens. All is misery and repression. He stops just short of giving us Russians shuffling through the snow with downcast eyes, sunken cheeks, and their feet bound in rags. Never does our Anton mention Putin’s 80 percent approval rating, to say nothing of explaining it—which I would appreciate a correspondent doing.    These things being as they are, it nonetheless seems to me a step too far to obscure the import of the latest Putin–Xi summit and the former’s remarks to Russians to the extent Troianovski has done. Given the significance of the year gone by, this is too a bold betrayal of his profession and his readers to let go by without notice.     Do you think the cultivation of ignorance in this fashion is a sign of a society’s health—a restorative, a source of strength? Or is it the opposite, one cause among many of the palpable decline in our public discourse, the tearing of our social fabric, the rampant confusion among us, the absence of purpose with which so many of us must live? — Patrick Lawrence: The Sino-Russian Summit You Didn’t Read

2022 Prediction Proved True: Meanwhile, a growing body of research suggests that climate change is likely increasing the risk of extreme precipitation events along the Pacific coast of North America (12, 13), including California (14–16), and of subsequent severe flood events (17, 18). The primary physical mechanism responsible for this projected regional intensification of extreme precipitation is an increase in the strength of cool-season atmospheric river (AR) events (19–21). Previous analyses have suggested that the thermodynamically driven increase in atmospheric water vapor with warming is directly responsible for most of this projected AR intensification [e.g., (16)], with the remainder contributed by shifts in regional atmospheric circulation. There is also evidence that increased radiative forcing may result in an eastward-shifted expression of atmospheric circulation anomalies associated with both the Madden-Julian Oscillation (22) and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO)–forced component of the Pacific North American pattern (23)—both of which would increase the sub-seasonal variability of cool-season precipitation over and near California. Compounding the increase in extreme precipitation associated with AR events are warming temperatures themselves (24)—which raise the mean elevation of snow accumulation in mountainous areas (25), increase instantaneous runoff rates as rain falls at the expense of snow (18), and raise the risk of “rain on snow” events (26). Collectively, these previous research findings motivate the question of whether climate change may substantially affect the odds of “low probability but high consequence” flood events. — Climate Change is Increasing the risk of a California Megaflood.

Videos/Podcasts of the Day:

Black Agenda Radio December 16, 2022

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!):

Noam Chomsky: Another World It’s Possible. Let’s Bring It to Reality. Labor and other popular activism can help shape the economic system in ways that will benefit people, not private power. It’s a truism that the world is in a dismal state; indeed, there are too many great challenges facing our world and the planet is in fact at a breaking point, as Noam Chomsky elaborates on an exclusive interview below for Truthout. What’s less widely recognized is that another world is possible because the present one (Capitalism —R.S) is simply not sustainable, says one of the world’s greatest public intellectuals.

An Unholy Government-Corporate Alliance Implemented a Psy-Op on Americans Of course, over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been hearing about the Twitter files.  Most of us knew this stuff was going on not only on Twitter but Facebook and other social media platforms.  In fact, we’ve known that government offices have existed at Facebook for some time now.  However, while we were constantly told it was for looking for terrorists, blah, blah, blah, the reality was that the real terrorists occupied those offices and were working in the midst of these beasts.  These corporate fascists and Nazis within the US government were using it all as a psy-op and attack on the American people.

Marjorie Cohn:Cuba Says Biden Applies Blockade Even More Aggressively Than His Predecessors Biden has maintained many of Trump’s sanctions against Cuba. He must fulfill his promise to reverse Trump’s actions. he current U.S. government, the one of Joseph Biden, of all those that the Cuban Revolution has known, is the one that has most aggressively and effectively applied the economic blockade,” Carlos Fernández de Cossío, vice minister of Foreign Affairs of Cuba, declared in a speech on December 14. “It is the one that punishes the most, the one that causes the most damage to the daily life of Cubans and the economy as a whole.” 

The Chris Hedges Report: Mickey Huff & Nolan Higden on the Disappearance of Democratic Debate and Dialogue in America Democratic debate and dialogue have all but vanished in the United States. There is widespread censorship imposed by social media platforms, private corporations about which we know nothing, while they know everything about us. Mainstream news outlets champion censorship and deplatforming in the name of democracy. Brian Seltzer, for example, on CNN justified banning Donald Trump form social media because, he said, “reducing a liar’s reach is not the same as censoring freedom of speech.” Sean Hannity on Fox News spent 40 minutes talking over former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, the same tactic CNBC host Rick Santelli used to shut down debate about COVID-19. The impulse is to silence opponents rather than engage in dialogue and debate. This extreme polarization, as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write in How Democracies Die, is one of the primary signs of a dying democracy. Nolan Higdon, a lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz and Mickey Huff, the director of Project Censored and president of the nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation, join me to discuss this dangerous inability to communication among antagonistic groups and their new book Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy.

Environment — Ecosocialism or Ecocide:

Ecosocialism Not Extinction!

Cop15 Was Meant to be Nature’s Paris Moment, But Greta Thunberg’s ‘Blah, Blah, Blah’ Cry is Proving Right Even by the glacial standards of UN biodiversity negotiations, Cop15 has been slow. We have been in Montreal for more than a week and I am flabbergasted at the lack of progress, especially after how important several world leaders said the summit would be. There is still time to turn it around. But there is no political urgency behind the biodiversity crisis or any desire for transformative change, as far as I can tell. Greta Thunberg’s “blah, blah, blah” criticism of government negotiations on the environment is proving right as things stand, unfortunately.

Dr. Warren Hern: Humans Are a Metastasizing Cancer Terminating Life on the Planet Dr. Warren Hern: Humans Are a Metastasizing Cancer Terminating Life on the Planet It is not an exaggeration to call the future of the planet an apocalyptic, extinction-bearing time, according to physician and anthropologist Dr. Warren Hern. Hern joins Scheer Intelligence host Robert Scheer this week to discuss his latest book, “Homo Esophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth.” Apart from conducting decades of research in fertility and population trends based in the Peruvian Amazon, Hern has had his clinical and epidemiological research published widely in respected journals as well as had his public advocacy of reproductive rights appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications.

Civil Rights Black Liberation:

More Women Are Being Incarcerated as Jail Populations Near Pre-COVID Levels  “I fear the increased rate of women’s incarceration is showing us that we are returning to business as usual,”The number of women in jail increased by almost 6 percent from 2021 to 2022 — three times the rate of men.

Black Agenda Report

Labor: 

Economy:

Polycrisis and Depression in the 21st century ‘Polycrisis’ is the buzz word among leftists right now.  The word expresses the coming together and interlocking of various crises: economic (inflation and slump); environmental (climate and pandemic); and geopolitical (war and international divisions). Indeed, I raised a similar idea early last year.      So it is no surprise that the latest Human Development Report from the UN is so shocking.  According to the HDR, the world is more pessimistic than at any point in modern history stretching back to before WW1.     The HDR analysed language trends in books over the past 125 years. It reveals a sharp increase in expressions reflecting “cognitive distortions associated with depression and other forms of mental distress”. Over the past two decades the language reflecting overly negative perceptions of the world and its future has surged. Indeed, today’s distress levels are unprecedented, exceeding those during the Great Depression and both world wars.     

Federally-Insured, Crypto-Focused Silvergate Bank Loses 43 Percent of Its Market Value Yesterday as Depositors Flee If you’re looking for the poster child for everything that is toxic about mixing crypto with federally-insured banks, look no further than Silvergate Capital Corporation, parent of federally-insured Silvergate Bank. Yesterday, the company lost 42.73 percent of its market capitalization in one trading session, putting its stock price losses at 91 percent over the past 12 months.     The stock has been plunging since April of last year. Then came the jarring news on November 11 that one of its large customers, crypto exchange FTX, was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy along with its sister hedge fund, Alameda Research – which, it turns out, had been using (and losing) billions of dollars of FTX customer funds to trade and acquire without the knowledge of customers. More than 100 opaque affiliates of FTX, many headquartered in offshore locations, also filed for bankruptcy. Three executives of the two firms have been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on a combined total of 19 criminal counts and new management has Testified To Congress That $8 Billion Of Customer Funds Are Missing.

World: 

Patrick Lawrence: The Sino-Russian Summit You Didn’t Read About The New York Times coverage of the recent summit between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping misses some of its most important details, writes Patrick Lawrence. It is never very easy to understand what is going on in the world if you depend on The New York Times for an accounting of daily events. This is especially so in all matters to do with Russia, China, or any other nation The Times has on its blacklist because the policy cliques in Washington have these countries on their blacklist. Rely on The Times for its reporting in these cases and you are by definition in the dark. No exceptions. This is what the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record has done to itself and to its readers over, I would say, the past 20–odd years. It is now nothing more than an instrument of the imperial ideology emanating from our nation’s capital.

Brazil: PSOL Leadership Paves the Way for Joining Lula-Alckmin Government At a meeting of the National Board of PSOL (‘Party of Socialism and Liberty’), on Saturday 17 December, resolutions were discussed and passed drawing a balance sheet of the party’s 2022 election campaign, and on the relationship between the party and its parliamentary faction with the new Lula government.     On 22 November, Esquerda Marxista (‘Marxist Left’, the Brazilian section of the IMT) published an open letter to the National Leadership of PSOL. In it, we characterised the decision of the majority of the party’s National Executive to take part in the transitional government as a mistake. We called on the national leadership of PSOL to correct this mistake, and for the non-participation of PSOL in the Lula-Alckmin government, which is in fact a government of national unity with the bourgeoisie. Rather, we argued it must preserve its independence so as to become a fighting pole of attraction for the workers and youth in their resistance against the inevitable attacks that the future government will launch, while also forming a united front to fight the attacks that the government faces from extreme right wing coup-plotters (read the open letter in Portuguese here).

 

How Do You Mourn the Death of an Israeli Democracy That Never Was? If we are to believe that Israel’s exclusivist and racially based “democracy” is a democracy at all, then we are justified to also believe that Israel’s new government is neither less nor more democratic than the previous governments. Even before the new Israeli government was officially sworn in on December 29, angry reactions began emerging, not only among Palestinians and other Middle Eastern governments, but also among Israel’s historic allies in the West.

As early as November 2, top US officials conveyed to Axios that the Joe Biden Administration is “unlikely to engage with Jewish supremacist politician, Itamar Ben-Gvir”.     In fact, the US government’s apprehensions surpassed Ben-Gvir, who was convicted by Israel’s own court in 2007 for supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism.

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    

Lenin’s Struggle Against Bureaucracy Today, 4 January 2023, marks the centenary of Lenin’s dictation of his postscript to his ‘Letter to the Congress’, also known as his ‘Testament’. In it, Lenin took up the struggle against the bureaucratisation of the Soviet state, which was threatening to derail all the gains of the revolution. Suppressed for decades by Stalin, this Testament dispels the slander that Stalinism was the continuation of Leninism. In conjunction with his last articles and letters, Lenin’s Testament gives evidence of the importance that he attached to the danger of the growing bureaucracy. In his letter and postscript, Lenin explicitly calls for the removal of Stalin as general secretary of the Communist Party, and contrasts him to Trotsky, who he described as “the most capable man on the present CC”