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Daily News Digest February 7, 2023

Images of the Day:

Hysteria Over a Balloon!

It’s a Balloon!Editorial Cartoon: Chinese Spy Balloon

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:

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 the current darkness of this Liaise Fair Capitalist Orwellian Society, I can walk through the darkness and see where “the corn is green” — I can still imagine in the words of, John Lennon, ‘Imagine all the people Living life in peace’ and in harmony with nature. And I am not a dreamer! — Roland Sheppard

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!)

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

US Media Whips Up Anti-Chinese Hysteria Over Balloon Flight . . . All of the media coverage has accepted the unsubstantiated claim that the airship was a secret Chinese “surveillance balloon” specifically targeting US military installations. While the specific purpose of the balloon cannot be definitively stated, the notion that the Chinese government is seeking to secretly obtain vital information on US nuclear weapons by means of a gigantic and clearly visible object slowly passing through US airspace is, to put it mildly, ludicrous. Far more likely is the account given by Beijing, that the high-altitude balloon was conducting meteorological surveillance and was blown off course, entering the United States on January 28. “It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes,” China’s Foreign Ministry said. “Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course.” NASA has launched dozens of balloon missions similar to the one destroyed by the US Air Force on Saturday. According to a NASA presentation by University of Hawaii Professor Peter Gortham, “Balloons offer flight opportunities for unique science investigations that require, or can be done in, near-space.” According to the website of NASA’s arctic balloon program, “Scientists use scientific data collected during balloon flights to help answer important questions about the universe, atmosphere, the Sun and the space environment.”

Patrick Lawrence: The Pentagon’s Balloon Floats On Why is the Biden regime not making serious, vigorous representations in Beijing—threatening a break in relations, diplomatic expulsions, or other such retaliation for a breach of American sovereignty—about this “spy craft?” It is just as well that Antony “Guardrails” Blinken has called off his long-scheduled visit to Beijing, which was due to begin Tuesday. It would have been his first since taking over at State and the first by a secretary of state in four years. But Blinken would not have got any guardrails in place or built any exit ramps, which he seems to consider his highest calling. Let us wonder, parenthetically, if our Tony wasn’t meant to be a transportation engineer. No, given the events of the past few weeks, the time for guardrails, exit ramps, and even “easing tensions”–was psychotherapy Blinken’s missed vocation?–would appear to be past for the Biden regime and its relations with Beijing. In my read, Blinken just spared himself another in a considerable line of embarrassments since he made a dog’s dinner of his first encounter with his Chinese counterparts during that infamous debacle in an Anchorage hotel two years ago next month.

China Slams Pentagon’s Downing of Balloon as an ‘Excessive Reaction’ China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the U.S. military’s move, ordered by President Joe Biden, “seriously violates international convention.” China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry issued a statement Saturday condemning the Pentagon for shooting down a balloon that Beijing says was a civilian aircraft that drifted over the United States by mistake. “The Chinese side clearly requested that the U.S. appropriately deal with this in a calm, professional, and restrained manner,” the ministry said, again dismissing the Pentagon’s claim that the high-altitude balloon was part of a surveillance operation aimed at monitoring sensitive military sites.

The Ukraine War in the Light of the UN Charter The war in Ukraine did not start on 24 February 2022, but already in February 2014. The civilian population of the Donbas has endured continued shelling from Ukrainian forces since 2014, notwithstanding the Minsk Agreements. These attacks on Lugansk and Donetsk significantly increased in January-February 2022, as reported by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine [1]. Like all wars, this war is a tragedy for all concerned, — not only for Ukrainians and Russians, but also for the continued validity of international law and the primacy of the UN Charter. Already NATO’s military campaigns in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq in the 1990s and early 2000s sorely tried the authority and credibility of the United Nations as an Organization. These military campaigns conducted outside Chapter VII of the UN Charter rendered the United Nations nearly irrelevant because the Organization was unable to prevent the illegal use of force or mediate peace.

Ralph Nader: The Progenitor of Inequalities—Corporate Personhood vs. Human Beings The biggest prize of all for the uses of corporate-dominant inequality over real people is the control of the Congress, state legislatures, country boards, city councils, and elections, along with the selection of judges. The word “inequality” is everywhere in the media. It usually refers either to race, gender, rich vs. poor, or other differences between human beings. Absent from the public debate is the biggest perpetrator of “inequality” against human beings—the corporate entity itself. Ever since 1886 when a U.S. Supreme Court reporter, in a headnote for the Court’s opinion, wrote that corporations possessed equal rights under the Constitution, judges and corporatist legislators have equipped corporations with an arsenal of inequitable rights. (The Constitution makes no mention whatsoever of “corporation” or “company”).

Massive Inequality Is a “Concerted Elite Class Project,” Says Heather Gautney It’s no accident that inequalities have widened under entrenched corporate power, says sociologist Heather Gautney In 1956, the famed sociologist C. Wright Mills published The Power Elite, a blistering critique of concentrated political, economic and military power in the United States. The book influenced many protest movements of the 1960s and has inspired radical scholars and activists ever since. Now, in 2023, Heather Gautney is continuing Mills’s project of analyzing and mapping out elite power in the U.S. In her new book, The New Power Elite, she offers a wide-ranging and urgent analysis of entrenched corporate power in the U.S. today. From Wall Street to Big Tech, from billionaires to celebrities, Gautney maps out the composition of today’s power elite and its methods of exploiting poor and working people to extract ever more wealth and profit!

Environment — Ecosocialism of Ecocide!:

UN Chief Unleashes on Fossil Fuel Giants: ‘Your Core Product Is Our Core Problem’ “No more baby steps. No more excuses. No more greenwashing,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. “No more bottomless greed of the fossil fuel industry and its enablers. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres made clear Monday that securing a livable planet depends on stopping the “bottomless greed of the fossil fuel industry and its enablers.”

Whitewash and Greenwash: World Bank is no Friend of Working People or the Planet Every so often, the World Bank puts out a paper that calls for better social protection or at least a somewhat better deal for working people. The public relations people there evidently believe we have very short memories. No, dear reader, the World Bank has not changed its function, nor have elephants begun to fly. Without any hint of irony, the World Bank’s latest attempt at selective amnesia is what it calls its Social Protection and Jobs strategy, in which it purports to advocate that the world’s national governments “greatly expand effective coverage of social protection programs” and “significantly increase the scale and quality of economic inclusion and labor market programs.”

New Wind and Solar Are Cheaper Than the Costs to Operate All But One Coal-Fired Power Plant in the United States New analysis shows that renewables beat existing coal plants 99 percent of the time, thanks to long-term trends and an assist from the Inflation Reduction Act. A coal-fired plant near Gillette, Wyoming stands alone in the nation on one measure of economic viability—a positive distinction for that plant, but a damning one for coal-fired electricity in general. Dry Fork Station, with generating capacity of 405 megawatts, is the only coal plant in the country that costs less to operate than it would take to replace the plant’s output by building new wind or solar plants in the same communities or regions, according to a new report issued today by the think tank Energy Innovation.

George Monbiot: ‘Let Them Eat Lentils’ Won’t Save Us From Animal Farming – We Must Embrace Meat Substitutes Our insatiable appetite for meat is destroying the planet. But the alternative is looking (and tasting) better by the day So here’s a question for all the sceptics. What do you intend to do about the soaring global demand for animal products, and its devastating impacts? Already, 60% of the mammals on Earth by weight are livestock. Humans account for 36%, wild mammals for just 4%. Of birds, poultry make up 71%, wild species only 29%. While the human population is growing at 1% a year, the livestock population is growing at 2.4%. Global average meat consumption per person is 43kg a year, but swiftly heading towards the UK level of 82kg. The reason is Bennett’s Law: as people become richer, they eat more protein and fat, especially the flesh and secretions of animals.

Bird Flu ‘An Urgent Warning to Move Away From Factory Farming’ Experts claim deadly spillovers of disease between livestock and wildlife are increasing with the growth in intensive methodsCatastrophic declines in the number of birds and other wildlife are likely if countries do not act urgently to change the way animals are farmed, wildlife health scientists have warned.

Spread of Bird Flu to Mammals Could Put Humans in Danger, Scientists Warn “This is an infection that has epidemic and pandemic potential,” said one doctor. “I don’t know if people recognize how big a deal this is.” As a deadly strain of avian influenza continues to decimate bird populations around the world and spread among other animals, some scientists are warning that mammal-to-mammal transmission has emerged as a real possibility with potentially catastrophic consequences for humans.

Civil Rights Black Liberation:

Marjorie Cohn: “Broken Windows Policing” Gave Rise to SCORPION Unit That Killed Tyre Nichols Broken windows policing reflects racialized assumptions about what is disorder and which communities are disorderly. The Memphis police officers who killed Tyre Nichols were members of a unit called SCORPION — the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in our Neighborhoods. But far from “restoring peace,” these officers turned the streets of Memphis into a violent scene of torture that led to the death of Nichols. SCORPION was modeled after the bogus theory of “broken windows policing ”: the thoroughly debunked idea that if cops make arrests for minor offenses, it will prevent the commission of serious ones. But it didn’t work out that way. Under the guise of enforcing a traffic law, the officers who murdered Nichols committed much more serious crimes. After Nichols was killed, SCORPION was disbanded.

Memphis Police Chief Trained With Israel Security Forces Chief Cerelyn Davis also led the first police department in the U.S. that swore off the exchanges. The death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police officers last month once again ignited outrage over the violent, militarized nature of U.S. law enforcement and placed scrutiny on police departments’ bloated budgets. Among the objections to policing that are being revived are criticisms of a controversial series of trainings and exchange programs for U.S. police in Israel. Scores of American law enforcement leaders have attended the programs, where they learned from Israeli police and security forces known for systemically abusing the human rights of Palestinians.

Labor:

Economy:

Keynes and the Left “The theories of John Maynard Keynes provide the sound intellectual framework for the views which trade unionists had always instinctively held and known to be right” (TUC, 1968, p. 85) The ideas and theories of John Maynard Keynes still dominate the economic views and policy proposals of the leaders of the labour movement in the major capitalist economies. Keynes is seen as offering a ‘third way’ between the pro-capitalist ‘free market’ economics that dominates the universities (and among the strategic advisers of government) and the opposite of dangerously revolutionary Marxian economics. Keynes argued that, with a judicious range of policy measures, capitalism can be made to work better and can be managed so that it meets the needs of the many, without disrupting the social structure of society. On this blog and elsewhere, I have developed a long and detailed critique of Keynesian economics. But suffice it to say now that free market economics claims that prosperity will be achieved as long as capitalists are free of any regulations (environmental, safety, health etc) and of too much taxation, while markets are kept ‘competitive’ and free of monopolies, particularly in the ‘labour market’ ie. trade unions. Then capitalists can compete freely to maximise profits and in doing so will invest in new technology to boost the productivity of labour and employ more workers, whose wages will then rise. Everybody wins. The Keynesians retort that free market capitalism (‘laisser-faire economics’, Keynes called it) does not work because the market economy has faultlines that generate a chronic lack of ‘effective demand’. Holding down wages to boost profits means capitalists cannot sell all their production and are periodically forced into laying off workers and unemployment ensues. It is necessary for governments to intervene and raise wage levels and/or increase government spending to fill the gap in aggregate demand. Then this will create enough demand for capitalists to sell their goods and make a profit. So a judicious macro management of the market economy can work for all.

Bombshell Emails Raise Questions about What Sullivan & Cromwell Knew about Fraud at Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Firms Just four days before Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, FTX, collapsed into bankruptcy, Sullivan & Cromwell law partner Andrew (Andy) Dietderich sent an email to an attorney representing Voyager Digital’s Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors in its bankruptcy proceedings, stating that FTX was “rock solid.” At the time, Sullivan & Cromwell was representing FTX in a very aggressive move to purchase $1 billion of Voyager’s crypto assets. The law partner representing the Voyager creditors was Darren Azman of law firm McDermott Will & Emery. The email exchange on November 7, 2022 went as follows, according to exhibits McDermott Will & Emery submitted to the Voyager bankruptcy court in the Southern District of New York last week:

World:

Thousands of Youth March For Socialism in the Basque Country We have received this report from a comrade who participated in one of two demonstrations called in the Basque Country on 28 January. We think it is very significant that thousands of young people participated in these militant demonstrations under the banner of socialist revolution. This movement should be an inspiration for revolutionary Marxists around the world, and we congratulate the comrades of GKS on their success. On 28 January, a big demonstration called by Gazte Koordinadora Sozialista (GKS) [Socialist Youth Coordination] took place in Bilbao and Iruña [Pamplona] under the slogan “Enpresari eta agintarien erasoaldiaren aurreran, gazte langileok borrokara!” (“Faced with the offensive of the employers and rulers, working class youth struggle!”) A total of around 7,000 people joined the two mobilisations with a very clear aim: to denounce the living conditions of the working class, to organise independently, and to fight for socialism.

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!

In New York Times Op-Ed, US Physician Blasts ‘Lucrative System of For-Profit Medicine’ “Doctors’ sense of our complicity in putting profits over people has grown more difficult to ignore.” A U.S. physician took to the op-ed pages of The New York Times on Sunday to offer a scathing condemnation of the country’s for-profit healthcare system and his profession’s historical complicity in a condition commonly associated with terminal illness that’s characterized by a sense of helplessness and loss of purpose,” wrote Eric Reinhart, a physician at Northwestern University. “American physicians are now increasingly suffering from a similar condition, except our demoralization is not a reaction to campaigns against universal coverage. “Doctors have long diagnosed many of our sickest patients with ‘demoralization syndrome,’ a medical condition, but rather to the diseased systems for which we work.”