Daily News Digest February 6, 2023

Daily News Digest Archives

Images of the Day:

Books Not Guns!Bendib: Like Night and Day

Latuff: Palestinian Vs. Israeli Life According to Western Standards

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:

China’s foreign ministry says the balloon is indeed from China but is “civilian in nature, used for meteorological and other scientific research,” and was simply blown far off course. This could of course be untrue — all major governments spy on each other constantly and China is no exception — but the Pentagon’s own assessment is that the balloon “does not create significant value added over and above what the PRC is likely able to collect through things like satellites in Low Earth Orbit.”     So everyone’s losing their minds over a balloon that in all probability would be mostly worthless for spying, even while everyone knows the U.S. spies on China at every possible opportunity. U.S. officials have complained to the press that American spies are having a much harder time conducting operations and recruiting assets in China than they used to because of measures the Chinese government has taken to thwart them, and in 2001 a U.S. spy plane caused a major international incident when it collided with a Chinese military jet on China’s coastline, killing the pilot. — Caitlin Johnstone: US Surrounds China With War Machinery While Freaking Out About Balloons

In contrast to a frustrating ongoing procrastination in America, Europeans are taking a much stronger stance on PFAS Chemicals. Forty-six (46) European civil society organizations have demanded an urgent banning by the EU of all PFAS consumer products by 2025 and “across all uses by 2030.” (Source: Civil Society Groups Urge the EU to Keep Their Promises to Ban ‘Forever Chemicals’ PFAS, Health, and Environment Alliance aka: HEAL, October 2022.) A statement by the Health and Environment Alliance/Europe: “PFAS pollution is out of control and exposure to several forever chemicals have been linked to an array of adverse health impacts, from liver damage to reduced response to routine vaccination by children and certain cancers. PFASs have contaminated the entire planet and are found in the bodies of most people around the globe.”   “We’re talking about a group of entirely human-made chemicals that didn’t exist on the planet a century ago and have now contaminated every single corner. No one gave their consent to be exposed to these harmful chemicals, we haven’t had the choice to opt out and now we have to live with this toxic legacy for decades to come. The very least we can do is to stop adding to this toxic burden by banning PFAS use and production now,” —  Dr. Julie Schneider, PFAS campaigner at CHEM Trust. (HEAL) — Forever Chemicals, Everywhere

Videos/Podcasts of the Day:

Russia Not in This War With Ukraine to Fight For a Stalemate— Scott Ritter

Nuclear War Imminent?

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley

Black Agenda Radio February 3, 2023

Cuba, Africa, and Apartheid’s End: Africa’s Children Return – Part 2

Albina Community Fights for Restitution of Seized Property

Minnesota Freedom Fund Fights for Bail Justice

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 

 Beating the Drums For War With China!

Balloon

1/31/2023: This Air Force general is Rallying His Troops For War With China A provocative new memo from a four-star Air Force general is sounding an alarm on China — and raising eyebrows among rank-and-file airmen. Gen. Mike Minihan, who as head of Air Mobility Command oversees the U.S. Air Force’s cargo and tanker fleet, urged airmen to be “unrepentantly lethal” in preparation for a potential war with China that may be two years away.

 2/03/31:The Latest on the Suspected Chinese Spy Balloon Over the US

 There are Profits to be Made! 2/03/2023: White House-Linked Venture Capital Fund Boasts China War Would be Great for Business A representative from America’s Frontier Fund said that a “kinetic event” in the Pacific would be very good for its bottom line. A WAR BETWEEN China and Taiwan will be extremely good for business at America’s Frontier Fund, a tech investment outfit whose co-founder and CEO sits on both the State Department Foreign Affairs Policy Board and President Joe Biden’s Intelligence Advisory Board, according to audio from a February 1 event.     The remarks occurred at a tech finance symposium hosted at the Manhattan offices of Silicon Valley Bank. According to attendee Jack Poulson, head of the watchdog group Tech Inquiry, an individual who identified himself as “Tom” attended the event in place of Jordan Blashek, America’s Frontier Fund’s president and chief operating officer.

China Says Suspected Spy Balloon Over U.S. Skies is a Civilian Airship

Key Points:

  • Chinese authorities said Friday that a suspected Beijing-operated spy balloon spotted hovering over sensitive U.S. airspace was in fact a civilian airship intended for scientific research.
  • China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that westerly wind had caused the airship to stray into U.S. territory, describing the incident as a “force majeure.”
  • The statement comes hours after Beijing urged Washington to remain “cool-headed” amid its investigation into the incident.

Once Again, DNC Panel Blocks Vote on Dark Money Ban in Democratic Primaries Nevada Democratic Party Chair Judith Whitmer, the lead sponsor of the resolution, said that dark money is “being used to silence the voices our party most needs to hear.” For the second time in less than five months, the Democratic National Committee’s resolutions panel refused Thursday to allow a vote on a proposed ban on dark money in the party’s primaries, despite substantial support for the change among DNC members and prominent progressive lawmakers.

One Cannot ‘Reform’ a Political Party Bought and Paid For by the !%!: America and the Occupying Police Army Here‘s what we need to defund: the nation’s us-vs.-them mentality, which accomplishes virtually nothing except the maintenance of a status quo of fear. America, America . . . God kicks thee in the head. The twisted irony here — the irony of the brutal murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee last month — is that his killers were the ones hired and trained to keep the city safe. Instead, they created half an hour of hell for the young man, kicking and beating and tasing him to death a short distance away from his mother’s house, after a random, and perhaps unjustified, traffic stop.     One of the last words he uttered, as recorded on a pole-mounted police surveillance video of the incident, was a desperate cry: “Mom-m-m-m-m!”     Should we outlaw hell? Or maybe at least defund it?

Environment — Ecosocialism of Ecocide!:

Civil Rights Black Liberation:

On the Media’s Word Choices When It Comes to Police Murder When a major paper tells you that a traffic stop “escalated into a violent confrontation that ended up with” a dead Black person, understand that they are trying to gently lead you away from a painful reality. It’s hard to find words after yet another brutal police killing of a Black person, this time of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee, captured in horrifying detail on video footage released last week. But the words we use—and in that “we,” the journalists who frame these stories figure critically—if we actually want to not just be sad about, but end state-sanctioned racist murders, those words must not downplay or soften the hard reality with euphemism and vaguery.     Yet that’s exactly what the New York Times did in recent coverage. In its January 28 front-page story, reporter Rick Rojas led with an unflinching description of the brutal footage, noting that Nichols “showed no signs of fighting back” under his violent arrest for supposed erratic driving.

Roaming Charges: See No Evil Manuel Esteban Perez Terán was shot and killed by Atlanta police for trying to stop one of the last remnants of public forest in black Atlanta from being leveled and transformed into a training center for police, a place where cops would be taught the same brutal tactics that were used to kill him.     After the shooting, many of Teran’s companions, some of whom had been occupying the forest for months, were rounded up and charged, ludicrously, with domestic terrorism, even though it was nightly acts of systemic terrorism descending on the streets of Atlanta that they were, in part, trying to prevent.

“There’s Always Hope”: On Biden, Crump, and Pie in the Sky What would “police reform” really amount to under the American System of savage race and class disparity and apartheid? As the number of people killed by US police forces continues to rise and averages over eleven hundred per year, the victims disproportionately Black and nonwhite, and as tens of millions of Black Americans are still penned up in hyper-segregated ghettoes and prisons of despair, it’s long past time to admit that US police are acting precisely in accord with their systemic job description when they gun down young Black people. As the Memphis incident suggests, moreover, the job description applies even when the police themselves are Black. The job is to inflict terror in defense of ferocious race-class apartheid and racist mass incarceration and criminal branding – in service and protection of a system that provides little opportunity for a decent life for masses of young Black people.

Book Review:  The Judas Factor by Karl Evanzz 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 Fr     (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.Black Agenda Report:

 Labor:

Economy:Shadow Government Statistics Daily Update February 3rd to 7th

  • LATEST ECONOMIC, INFLATION AND MONETARY NUMBERS – Today’s (February 3rd) January 2023 Employment and Unemployment numbers were meaningfully distorted and disrupted by major Payroll benchmark revisions and series redefinitions. ShadowStats will post an extended review here in the next couple of days. That said, although not exactly comparable with December 2022, headline January 2023 Unemployment U.3 moved lower from 3.47% to 3.43%, but the broader headline U.6 moved higher from 6.53% to 6.64%, with the more comprehensive ShadowStats measure rising from 24.4% to 24.5% on top of the U.6. Benchmarked and redefined Payroll Employment growth revised higher since mid-2021, now recovering a downwardly revised February 2020 Pre-Pandemic Peak in June of 2022 instead of August 2022.
  • On the Monetary front, it’s the bloated Money Supply and gasoline price disruptions that are driving inflation, at present, not an overheating economy. Ongoing FOMC rate hikes to “reduce inflation,” are counterproductive in the context of an already deepening Economic Recession and resurgent gasoline prices: January 2023 Gasoline Prices just jumped 12.2% in the month, while December 2022 Real Construction Spending plunged ever deeper into a headline Recession, amidst a record annual-average plunge of 7.6% (-7.6%) in 2022. — PENDING COVERAGE: The December 2022 Real Merchandise Trade Deficit and the Preliminary January 2023 Monetary Base (Tuesday, February 7th).
  • LATEST FOMC: The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee hiked the targeted Federal Funds Rate February 1st by the expected, albeit somewhat less aggressive 0.25%, to a 15-year high level of 4.75%, hoping still to induce an imminent Economic Recession, which otherwise already is in play and deepening, due to earlier rate hikes

Charlie Munger’s OpEd in the WSJ Is Spot On About Banning Crypto; But Calling It “Gambling” Fails to Capture Its Dangers Charlie Munger is the 99-year old billionaire who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law and has been the close business partner of legendary investor, Warren Buffett, at Berkshire Hathaway for more than four decades.     For years now, both Munger and Buffett have been outspoken about the dangerous scam called cryptocurrencies. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal gave Munger space for a 393-word OpEd in which he urges the U.S. to ban crypto as China has done (and a lot of other countries). Unfortunately, those 393 words are competing with years of a nonstop barrage of hyped promises from right-wing Republicans in Congress who are happy to take big political donations from the crypto cabal; big public relations and marketing firms padding their bottom lines with what effectively amounts to money from defrauded crypto customers; K-Street lobbyists also on the dole to crypto firms; celebrities whoring on television for crypto; and, worst of all, Big Law firms attempting to legitimize myriad crypto frauds as “innovation” in order to compete for billable hours.

World:

Britain: After 1 February – Where Next For the Left? Sector after sector of workers are joining the growing strike wave. Further coordinated walkouts are in store, following Wednesday’s day of action. To strengthen the movement, these struggles need to be united and organised from top to bottom. Wednesday 1 February saw around 500,000 workers taking strike action over pay and conditions, and against the Tory anti-union laws. The last time this many workers walked out together was during the 2011 public sector pensions dispute. But the difference between now and then is like night and day. Now, there is over a decade of accumulated anger and discontent exploding onto picket lines and into the streets.      The ruling class recognizes this. That is why the Tory government is preparing for battle with their latest draconian legislation against the right to strike. Unite general secretary Sharon Graham commented recently that the Tories are “waging a forever class war”. We completely agree.     It is necessary for the labour movement to prepare for war also. The bosses and their representatives are getting organised. And so must we.

Education. Health, 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! 

Covid Roulette By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 26th January 2023

Your next infection could be the one that permanently disables you.

You could see Covid-19 as an empathy test. Who was prepared to suffer disruption and inconvenience for the sake of others, and who was not? The answer was often surprising. I can think, for instance, of five prominent environmentalists who denounced lockdowns, vaccines and even masks as intolerable intrusions on our liberties, while proposing no meaningful measures to prevent transmission of the virus. Four of them became active spreaders of disinformation.    If environmentalism means anything, it’s that our damaging gratifications should take second place to the interests of others. Yet these people immediately failed the test, placing their own convenience above the health and lives of others.     Now there are even fewer excuses, as we have become more aware of the costs of inaction. One of the justifications for selfishness was that liberating the virus would build herd immunity. But we now have plenty of evidence suggesting that exposure does not strengthen our immune system, but may weaken it. The virus attacks and depletes immune cells, ensuring that for some people, immune dysfunction persists for months after infection.     We also know that, with every new exposure, we are more likely to suffer adverse effects. A massive study in the US found that the risk of brain, nerve, heart, lung, blood, kidney, insulin and muscular disorders accumulates with every reinfection. The impacts of long Covid, according to health metrics researchers, are “as severe as the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury”. Now that we know how the virus attacks our cells, “traumatic brain injury” looks less like an analogy than a description. The outcomes can be devastating, ranging from extreme fatigue and breathlessness to brain fog, psychotic disorders, memory loss, epilepsy, and dementia.     We are all playing Covid roulette. The next infection could be the one that permanently disables you. I’ve been hit three times so far, and feel lucky still to be active. But I’ve lost a little every time: stamina, lung capacity, sleep, general fitness, however diligently I’ve exercised since. In all three cases, it seems, the infection has come from school. For families with school-age children, the chamber turns more often than for those without. Yet, three years after the pandemic began, the government still does almost nothing to make schools safe.     There’s a powerful argument that just as cholera was stopped by cleaning the water, Covid will be stopped by cleaning the air. The virus thrives in badly ventilated, shared spaces – especially classrooms, where students sit together for long periods. One study found that mechanical ventilation systems in classrooms reduce the infection risk by 74%.    The importance of ventilation and filtration is not lost on our lords and masters. Parliament now has a sophisticated air filter system, incorporating electrostatic precipitators. According to the contractor that fitted them, they ensure airborne viruses and bacteria are “kept to an absolute minimum within the space”. The same goes for the government departments where ministers work. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this month, there were filtration systems in every room, in some cases protecting politicians who have denied them to their own people. It’s almost as if they believe their lives are more important than ours.     The clean air standards rich and powerful people demand for themselves should be universal, rolled out to all schools and other public buildings. Instead, while private schools have been able to invest in ventilation and filtration, state schools, many of which are close to bankruptcy, rely on government disbursements that are strictly rationed by a series of nonsensical conditions. It’s another classic false economy. The extra costs of healthcare caused by repeated waves of infection and the long – perhaps lifelong – impacts for many of those affected must greatly outweigh the investment in cleaner air.     But instead of taking simple and effective actions – proper (N95) masks in public places, filtration in shared spaces – we have steadily normalised a mass disabling agent. It’s likely, eventually, to reduce the number of quality years for almost everyone. Those who suffer the extreme version of this disablement, long Covid, are treated as an embarrassment we would prefer to forget.     You need only gently propose that we might return to wearing masks on public transport to provoke hundreds of people on social media to bray “freedom!” and denounce you as a tyrant. Against their tiniest of freedoms – keeping their faces uncovered on trains and buses – the trolls weigh freedom from disability and even death, and decide that their right to breathe germs on to other people is the indispensable liberty.     These are the people who, with their threats and conspiracy theories, may have helped drive Jacinda Ardern, the politician who arguably protected more people from the virus than any other, out of office. They are the people who, in some cases, have abused mask wearers in the street, and doctors and nurses in hospitals. If they have not yet been infected, they attribute their good fortune to “natural immunity”, rather than not getting out very much. An Old Testament ableism pervades the ideology: those who are ill deserve to be ill.     I’m not suggesting that everyone who fails to wear a mask on public transport fails the empathy test. That would now condemn almost the entire population. But, without direction from the government and the cultural shift this could provoke, even the kindest people end up behaving as if they have no regard for others.     “Move on”, “get over it”: these are the incantations of people who seek to shed responsibility for their actions. It’s what Tony Blair said after the Iraq war. It’s what Boris Johnson said after he was caught repeatedly breaking the rules. Of course we urgently want it to be over. But it isn’t. The virus is now embedded, and will continue to mutate to avoid our defences, grinding down – unless we treat each other with respect and demand universal standards of clean indoor air – our immune systems and our health, until everyone’s life is a shadow of what it might have been.     Do we really mean to sit and watch as this infection encroaches on our freedom to be well, brutal winter after brutal winter? Or do we step in where the government has failed, and normalise concern for the lives of others once more? Like all the other moral challenges we face, this is now on us.