Daily News Digest January 23, 2023
Images:
Peru: Massive March on Lima and National Strike Puts Dina Boluarte Against the Ropes
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!
apitalism 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:
Is Bruening the “Lesser Evil”? The social democracy supports Bruening, votes for him, and assumes the responsibility for him before the masses – on the basis that the Bruening Government is the “lesser evil”. The Rote Fahne attempts to ascribe the same view to me – on the basis that I expressed myself against the stupid and shameful participation of the Communists in the Hitler referendum. But have the German Left Opposition and myself in particular demanded that the Communists vote for and support Bruening? We Marxists regard Bruening and Hitler, together with Braun, as component parts of one and the same system. The question, which one of them is the “lesser evil”, has no sense, for the system against which we are fighting needs all these elements. But these elements are momentarily involved in conflicts with one another and the party of the proletariat must take advantage of these conflicts in the interest of the revolution. — Trotsky, — The Impending Danger of Fascism in Germany
Brinkmanship?: Yesterday, as Secretary Austin just mentioned, President Biden released our 30th security assistance package, signifying our continued commitment to Ukraine, and this package, combined with our previous one, includes combined arms maneuver capabilities with supporting artillery, equivalent to at least two combined arms maneuver brigades or six mech infantry battalions, 10 motorized infantry battalions, and four artillery battalions, along with a lot of other equipment. This package — this U.S. package, along with the allied donations that were indicated today, signify our collective resolve and our commitment to Ukraine to protect their population from the indiscriminate Russian attacks and to provide the armor necessary to go on the offensive, to liberate Russian-occupied Ukraine. — Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and General Mark A. Milley Press Conference Following Ukraine Defense Contact Group Meeting, Ramstein Air Base, Germany
Videos/Podcasts of the Day:
Belmarsh Tribunal on Julian Assange, Press Freedom & More On January 20, 2023, Democracy Now! is livestreaming the Belmarsh Tribunal from Washington, D.C. The event will feature expert testimony from journalists, whistleblowers, lawyers, publishers and parliamentarians on assaults to press freedom and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Michael Hudson: Geopolitical Economy
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!)
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. — Louis D. Brandeis Quotes
The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. MLK, Beyond Vietnam
The Hidden Drive to Apply the Iron Heel: New Report Details Why Wealthy People Really Oppose Democracy Why are America’s plutocrats funding efforts to weaken our democracy and replace it with plutocracy and oligarchy? Is it just about money? Or is there something much deeper that most Americans rarely even consider? An extraordinary investigative report from documented.net tells how morbidly rich families, their companies, and their personal foundations are funding efforts to limit or restrict democracy across the United States. In an article co-published with The Guardian, they noted: “The advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the powerful conservative think tank based in Washington, spent more than $5m on lobbying in 2021 as it worked to block federal voting rights legislation and advance an ambitious plan to spread its far-right agenda calling for aggressive voter suppression measures in battleground states.”
America’s Inequality Problem in One Statistic If you work for a big corporation, there’s a very good chance your boss has already raked in more cash than you will all year. If the typical CEO of a large U.S. corporation clocked in at 9 am on January 2, by 3:37 pm that afternoon he’d made$58,260 — the average annual salary for all U.S. occupations. In less than seven hours on the first workday of the year, that CEO made as much as the average U.S. worker will make all year long. I recently took a look at the even wider disparities for various types of essential workers. My calculations are based on average S&P 500 CEO pay of $18.3 million in 2021 (the most recent figure available), which works out to $8,798 per hour, or $147 per minute.
It Comes Down to Political Practice, It Comes Down to Weapons The deep divisions in the US left over the Ukraine war can be reduced to a single practical question: Do you support sending weapons to Ukraine? The answer to that question depends on whether or not you accept the idea that we’re the cops of the world. The two parties accept this without question but the pro-weapons left? Behind a facade of left-sounding words, political practice tells the tale. Does the pro-weapons pro-war left practice what they preach? Do they raise their own funds to run their own guns or organize their own combat units? Are they at least joining Zelensky’s international legion and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their friends and allies? Hell no, they won’t go! Their practice is to let someone else do the dirty work: that “somebody” is the US military-industrial complex, NATO, but mostly the Ukrainian people they claim to care about.
Analysis Shows Corporate Prosecutions Hit Record Low in 2022 Under Biden “The decision to criminally charge a business in contrast to an individual for engaging in white-collar criminal activity is exceedingly rare.” Despite the Biden administration’s pledge to crack down on corporate crime, a new analysis of Justice Department data shows that business prosecutions fell to a record low in fiscal year 2022 even as there appeared to be no shortage of wrongdoing—from healthcare fraud to large-scale price gouging.
Did Washington Boost Another South American Coup? The U.S. tyranny of monopoly capital has long preferred to deal with fascist governments abroad, specifically in the Global South. American oligarchs’ foreign fascist sycophants are so much more malleable than democratic representatives; they don’t even have to be told what to do because they know. It’s in their DNA. From murdering peasants to tossing leftists out of helicopters during flight, to privatizing anything in the public domain to stuffing their offshore bank accounts with cash, to financing death squads to doing the bidding, whatever it may be, of Washington bigwigs, foreign fascists all read from the same script, and nowhere is their chorus more uniform than in Latin America. That’s because despite the southern continent’s repeated and determined lurch toward socialism over the past century, the U.S. has intervened with coups so often that by now Latino fascists have loads of experience. They know exactly what to do.
‘Open Admission of Fraud’: United CEO Says Airlines Are Scheduling Flights They Can’t Fulfill Facing criticism over recent air travel issues, the U.S. Transportation Department is reportedly investigating whether three airlines have scheduled flights they know they can’t staff. Three unidentified U.S. airlines are under federal investigation for potentially scheduling flights the companies know they ultimately will not be able to fly—a revelation The New York Timesreported Friday, just two days after United Airlines’ CEO suggested competitors are doing just that.
Biden Admin Still Pushing Trump-Era Legal Positions After Two Years in White House “As the previous administration violated legal and ethical norms at every turn, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s choice of continuity with the Trump DOJ’s positions erodes the integrity of the very institution he is determined to protect,” said one researcher.
We Must Stop Thinking of About This as a “Border Crisis” The narrow focus on “border security” puts real solutions out of reach — and imperils the universal right to seek refuge from danger. Most of us agree that the U.S. immigration system is in dire need of reform. But inflammatory rhetoric and policies designed to keep immigrants away won’t get us there. When I was in law school, I witnessed firsthand the difficulties faced by asylum seekers.
Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update January 20th to 24th
Environment — Ecosocialism of Ecocide!:
Exxon’s Rejection of Their Scientists
Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans. ― Jacques-Yves Cousteau
What is the Polluters Pay Fee and Why Isn’t It Being Collected?
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The Polluters Pay fee is one of the ways Superfund ensures that people responsible for pollution fund its clean-up. The EPA would collect a fee from the petroleum and chemical industries, which was used to fund cleanups for pollution sites that had no clearly identifiable responsible party or were polluted by bankrupt parties.
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The fee also served as a motivation to switch to less hazardous production methods.
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The tax has not been collected since 1995, however, and by 2004 there was no longer any money in the Superfund. Now, EPA is forced to fund Superfund through taxpayer money— taxpayers are paying to clean up pollution, rather than the polluters themselves.
Exxon’s Predictions About the Climate Crisis May Have Increased Its Legal Peril Several US states say news that Exxon scientists predicted global heating accurately strengthens their lawsuits against company Further revelations of the extent of Exxon’s historical knowledge of the unfolding climate crisis may have deepened the legal peril faced by the oil giant, with several US states suing the company for alleged deception, claiming their cases have now been strengthened. A research paper published last week found that from the 1970s onwards, Exxon climate scientists “correctly and skillfully” predicted climbing global temperatures, rising by around 0.2C a decade due to the burning of fossil fuels, often matching or surpassing the accuracy of projections by independent outside scientists.
Fukushima’s Toxic Dumping Flashpoint “We must remind Japan that if the radioactive nuclear wastewater is safe, just dump it in Tokyo, test it in Paris and store it in Washington, but keep our Pacific nuclear-free.” (Vanuatu’s celebrated former ‘Turaga Chief’ Motarilavoa Hilda Lini). In the face of considerable worldwide criticism, TEPCO is moving ahead with its well-advertised plans to dump contaminated water from storage tanks at the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster zone into the Pacific Ocean. They are running out of storage space and the Pacific Ocean is conveniently right next door. The Japanese government is courting trouble, as a contracting party to: (1) the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (2) the Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident, and (3) the Convention on Nuclear Safety, Japan has knowingly violated all three conventions by making the decision to dump contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean.
Plutonium Pit Bomb Plans Excoriated by General Accounting Office The independent General Accounting Office (GAO) issued a scathing report last week about the plan underway to refurbish plutonium pit triggers for nuclear weapons decades into the future. The GAO gave the National Nuclear Safety Administration a failing grade for its master plan to build “pit” factories in Los Alamos N.M. and Savannah River Site S.C., warning that costs, safety and quality controls could not be confidently verified by NNSA’s current management strategies. NNSA is a semiautonomous branch of the Department of Energy tasked with maintaining the potency of the U.S. nuclear deterrent. NNSA is also described by the GAO as an agency “at high risk of fraud, financial waste, abuse, and mismanagement”.
Civil Rights Black Liberation:
Activists Demand Independent Investigation After Cops Kill Protester in Atlanta The protester was shot and killed on Wednesday during a chaotic raid of the “Stop Cop City” forest defense camp. An activist was shot and killed by police on Wednesday during a violent raid of the protest camp and community gathering space that has blocked construction of an enormous police training facility known as “Cop City” on roughly 100 acres of public forest in southeast Atlanta. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation initially said a suspect was shot and killed after allegedly firing a gun and injuring a Georgia state trooper during the raid, but fellow protesters and community activists doubt the official narrative and are calling on journalists and legal observers to investigate. Tensions between police and the tree-sitting protesters (known as “forest defenders”) have been rising for months, and activists said they had previously demanded police stop bringing guns and other weapons into the forest to prevent needless injury and death.
Police Violence Reached an All-Time High Last Yea, Are We Ready to Shrink Police Budgets? The year 2022 was the deadliest year on record in the United States for fatalities at the hands of law enforcement. According to the Washington Post’s police shootings database, law enforcement officers shot and killed 1,096 people last year. In comparison, there were 1,048 shooting fatalities at the hands of police the year before, 1,019 the year before that, 997 the year before that, and so on. These numbers are most likely underestimated. According to Abdul Nasser Rad, managing director of research and data at Mapping Police Violence, the Post “only captures incidents where a police officer discharges their firearm and the victim is killed.” This means that it doesn’t count events like the 2014 killing of Eric Garner in New York and the 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, as both deaths resulted from asphyxiation. In contrast, Mapping Police Violence includes any action that a law enforcement officer takes that results in a fatal encounter. For example, Rad’s project concluded that police killed 1,158 people in 2021 compared to the Post’s figure of 1,048 (final results for 2022 are not yet available).
Let’s Abolish Systems That Criminalize and Punish Survivors of Abuse U.S. courts often reject domestic and sexual violence as legitimate justifications for self-defense. Content warning: This article describes domestic and sexual abuse, as well as violence committed by prison guards. Thousands of the women and trans and gender nonconforming people who are doing time in U.S. prisons have been doubly victimized — hurt first by other people, and then victimized by the criminal legal system. Taylor Partlow, a 30-year-old woman who is now incarcerated in New York, was sentenced to eight years after killing the man who abused her.
Labor:
Economy:
Davos 2023: Capitalism’s Polycrisis Strikes Fear Into the Ruling Class’ Hearts The global elites have been gathering in Davos this week, discussing the fate and future of capitalism. With the world economy wracked by inflation and instability, a mood of pessimism prevailed. We need a revolution to put them out of their misery. The great and the good have been congregating in Switzerland this week for the latest meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) – a (normally) annual conference that former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn accurately described as a “billionaires’ jamboree”. This year’s event was the first Davos summit since the start of the pandemic. And much has clearly changed since then. The word “polycrisis” provides a fair summary of the discussions at #WEF23 – used by multiple speakers over the past five days to describe the concatenation of dangers and threats that the global economy currently faces. “Economic, environmental, social, and geopolitical crises are converging and conflating,” declared WEF founder Klaus Schwab, opening this year’s symposium of the international elites.
China: Zig Zagging China is in deep trouble. Its zero-COVID policy has failed; the economy has slowed to halt; it now has a falling and fast-ageing population; it is in the midst of a property and debt crisis; so it is heading for a permanent, low productivity growth stagnation like Japan. Xi’s leadership is in crisis as he flails about swinging from one policy to another. And the risk is that the ‘aggressive nationalism’ of the CPC will lead to military action against ‘democratic’ Taiwan, just as Russia did with Ukraine. That’s the line of the Western economic experts and the media on a daily basis. All these arguments have been raised before and for that matter for the last 20-plus years: namely, that China is about to implode and the CP-control is about to collapse. I have provided balanced answers to all these issues many times before, in particular in a series of three posts only last October. So what can I add to the latest round of ‘expert’ speculation on the future of the Chinese economic model’? Well, the first obvious addition is the end of China’s zero-Covid policy. The experts paint this as a failure of the previous policy of the last three years. And yet in those three years, millions of lives were saved. John Ross gives us a comparison: if the world per capita death rate from Covid had been kept as low as China’s there would only be 29,000 Covid deaths globally instead of 6.7 million, while in the US there would have been only 1,200 deaths instead of the 1.1 million which actually occurred. So great is the impact of this US failure that after the pandemic China’s life expectancy, at 78.2 years, is now significantly higher than the US at 76.4 years. At the same time, China did not slip into a slump in 2020 unlike every other major economy; and indeed, increased the size of its economy in real terms and raised average living standards, while most major capitalist economies are only now getting back to the level of pre-pandemic 2019, as they now experience a dismal cost of living crisis.
Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update January 20th to 24th
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PLEASE NOTE: Due to the release of extensive and significant new material in the last three days, largely confirming the onset of a new and significant Economic Recession that ShadowStats has been predicting, a full update to the DAILY UPDATE text likely will not post before the weekend.
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That said, the ShadowStats outlook for a deepening new recession amidst higher inflation has not changed, only confirmed and strengthened by the new detail. Today’s Subscriber-only e-mailed DAILY UPDATE revisions and changes provided extensive new related graphs.
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IN THE NEWS: Updated – Today’s (January 20th) release of December 2022 Existing Home Sales continued full quarterly year-to-year and quarter-to-quarter contractions, as seen previously in the Fourth-Quarter 2022 reporting of yesterday’s (January 19th) December 2022 New Residential Construction, and in the prior day’s (January 18th) Retail Sales and Industrial Production.
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A likely new formal recession is coming into play, quickly, with further details here shortly, in extended coverage.
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In December 2022 New Residential Construction reporting, the more-stable Fourth-Quarter 2022 Building Permits series was down for the third consecutive quarter by 40.0% (-40.0%) year-to-year, by an annualized 12.3% (-12.3%) quarter-to-quarter, with the less-stable Housing Starts down year-to-year for the second consecutive quarter by 16.4% (-16.4%) in Fourth-Quarter 2022, and down at an annualized quarterly pace of 12.3% (-12.3%), for a the third consecutive quarter-to-quarter decline.
World:
China’s Hyperloop Completes First Test Runs, Pushing Ahead in Race for Ultra-Fast Land Transport
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Pod travels at 50km/h (31mph) through vacuum tube at Chinese facility to check critical components and prepare for future experiments
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The project aims to develop superconducting maglev trains that can carry passengers at speeds of 1,000km/h or more
A Chinese research facility developing an ultra-fast hyperloop train has completed its first test runs using a full-sized passenger capsule, according to media reports. China Space News reported on Wednesday that three test runs were completed at a superconducting maglev test line in Datong, Shanxi province. The project aims to eventually carry passengers and cargo at a speed of 1,000km/h (621mph) or faster in a near-vacuum tube and, if successful, would be the world’s fastest ground-based transport technology. During the test runs on January 14, the capsule reached speeds of up to 50km/h, traveling a distance of 210 meters (689 feet) each time, according to the report.
Peru: Massive March on Lima and National Strike Puts Dina Boluarte Against the Ropes They came from all over the country: from the south and the north; the coastal regions and the Amazonian jungle, many Aymara and Quechua speakers; workers, peasants and the student youth; all united in Lima with one aim – to bring down the illegitimate president Dina Boluarte who took office after the 7 December coup against Pedro Castillo. The march of the 4 Suyos (so named after the four cardinal points in the administrative division of the Inca empire) was huge, tens of thousands at the very least, though it is difficult to get a clear overall picture. From early in the morning they gathered in different parts of the capital Lima to march to the centre. They had been arriving since Monday, 16 January despìte the declaration of the state of emergency in the Departments of Lima, el Callao, Puno y Cusco by the government. Police road blockades tried to stop the motorcades converging on the capital, but to no avail, workers and peasants found a way through.
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 .